Time

Events

Devoid of hands and stripped of their functionality, William Eakin’s photographs of vintage watch faces transforms them into markers of time on an entirely different scale. By honoring the integrity of the objects he collects through his photographs, Eakin works to foreground the narratives in which they had participated before reaching his studio – they are simultaneously metaphors of time and its individual capsules. They bring together such complex histories as the cultural production of the Cold War, alongside fingerprints of the workers who assembled the watches. Traditionally, a photograph is meant to depict a moment in time, to hold it still while keeping the surrounding moments before and after forever inaccessible. In Time, Eakin’s intent is to subvert this expectation, opening the image for contemplation of a fuller sense of the idea of time.