Les Garde-Temps

Timepieces are clocks that keep precious time: the time of memory. They have been stopped dead in their tracks by natural or human catastrophes, from the Titanic to Hiroshima, from Buchenwald to the World Trade Center towers. They still display fateful moments. Some were stopped voluntarily to mark a revolution, a liberation, a singular event. The timepieces are sometimes out of order, but their silence speaks volumes about an extraordinary destiny. They are kept in public places, museums or private homes. They testify to a will: not to forget.

Through photography and text, Luc Debraine composes a fresco of these silent witnesses of history. He takes advantage of his quest, conducted for two decades throughout the world, to question the profound nature of photography and time. Taking a still image of a stopped clock is like suspending time twice. The gesture allows us to understand that photography and clock-making, two arts of time, have much in common. Roland Barthes said it: a camera is a clock to see.

With a foreword by physicist and philosopher of science Étienne Klein.