Linieermachines op de drukkerij 1921

T. Kaneo made this photograph, Linieermachines op de drukkerij, perhaps with a box camera, and the image is small. I imagine the artist might have had to work in the early morning to get just enough light. It's a black and white image, and there's something about that constraint that is interesting to me. The photograph depicts a busy printing press. There are men working at large machines. It feels like a scene from another time, one where the act of producing the image was also a kind of labor. I think about all the things that had to happen to even make this picture. I wonder what Kaneo was thinking. Did he see himself as simply documenting the scene? Or was he trying to say something more? Maybe he was thinking about the future, about how photography would change the way we see the world. It’s a question a lot of artists ask themselves, and each other.