Killing Time

My work with archives is, at its core, a questioning of documents as evidence for specific events. In ‚Killing Time‘ I used an archival photograph from the inventory of the Stadtarchiv, Munich’s public archive. The image apparently depicts Gastarbeiter labour migrants, photographed in Munich during the 1950s. For a mass-migration of fourteen million people, most of whom arrived through Munich’s central station, the Stadtarchiv holds a stunningly low number of photographic documents on the Arbeitsmigration. In 2007, when I first visited, I was presented with some sixty images, all of which had been shot by only one person, Rudi Dix, a Bavarian photo-journalist, who worked on assignments for local papers. In 2000, a few years after Dix’s death, friends donated his work-archive to the Stadtarchiv. There are three rolls of film portraying Gastarbeiter in Rudi Dix’s archive. Two of these were shot during the same day. One might ask what these images can represent…

So, just who were these men killing their time, leaning against a street sign? A white patch on one of the men’s wrists indicates that he once wore a watch. I wonder why it wasn’t there when he was captured by Dix’s lens.