Making Good Time, 1989

Hardcover, 72 pp., 67 duotone black and white, and, 27 color illustrations. 10.875” square
In this project I uncovered photographic efficiency studies, lost in archives and made for industry by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in the early part of the century. The Gilbreths employed small, strobing lights that they attached to factory workers to measure the “one best way” to do work. In Making Good Time I respond to the Gilbreth history of scientific management with my own time/motion studies, creating a dialog with the earlier work. The Gilbreths used blinking lights and camera time exposures to analyze the motions of factory workers, typists, soldiers and surgeons. They believed that the science of photography would disclose the “one best way” to do work, reduce fatigue on the job and increase production. In Making Good Time, I have translated their imagery to heighten the effect of the available contemporary connotations: Bodies disappear into blinks of electricity; faces blur like ghosts; clocks and grids determine time and position.
In this work I also connect the Gilbreths with other photographers, scientists and artists: Eadward Muybridge, Etienne Jules Marey, and the Italian Futurists. In my own time/motion photographs I turn the Gilbreths upside down. I want to find the “one best way” for the worst of reasons - to analyze motions that have never been measured and don’t need to be. I want to completely reevaluate day-to-day life, distorting the Gilbreth imperative to suit my needs: More waste = more fun. In Making Good Time there is an incomplete compendium of human endeavor: Emptying the Fridge, Packing Lunch, Wrapping Sandwiches, Cutting Meat. And, Brushing Hair, Brushing Teeth, and Changing Diapers. And what about Watering the Lawn and Watching TV? That’s me sitting for twenty minutes during an hour-long Everly Brothers Special on PBS, while automatic sprinklers were watering my backyard.

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items are from between 22 Mar 2007 & 15 Oct 2008.