THE BETTERMENT ROOM – DEVICES FOR MEASURING ACHIEVEMENT (2005)
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth used photographic time and motion studies to improve the performance of factory workers. A hundred years later, Clare Strand examines the behaviour and the visual identity of the post-industrial worker, taking her inspiration from the Gilbreth’s visual language. In Strand’s research, contemporary workers are fitted with special attachments and are set against grids and clocks to help the study of their productive capacity. The uneasy activities on the photographs, however, show that the modern activities we now call work are less clear and less easy to quantify than they used to be. Part of the project is the Cyclegraph series, in which she records the movements of her own hands.
Courtesy of Parrotta Contemporary Art Gallery, Cologne, Germany
