Those Who Hear the Ticking

“Those who hear the ticking”—a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in her 1968 essay On Violence—describes the first generation to fully grasp the looming reality of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war. As a child of this generation, I, too, have always heard the ticking. Though it softened for a time, today, it grows louder than ever.

This project examines the intersection of history, political tensions, and collective memory through found vernacular photography. Drawn from a personal archive of negatives spanning the 1880s to the 1980s, the work reanimates latent narratives embedded within images once discarded and forgotten. These photographs become windows into a world shaped by nuclear anxiety, political upheaval, war, and the uncertainty of rapid societal change.

Unlike digital files, negatives are physical, unalterable witnesses to the moments they capture—preserving not just an index of a moment, but also the biases, omissions, and secrets embedded within the societies that produced them. What they reveal is inseparable from what they obscure, positioning the image as both evidence and construction.

Forming a constellation of personal and collective experiences, this work explores the hopes and fears of a world undergoing relentless transformation. It reflects on how individuals sought escape from existential dread while power structures dictated the course of history. By highlighting the lingering impact of colonial perspectives and geopolitical tensions, Those Who Hear the Ticking invites viewers to reconsider photography’s role—not just as a passive record, but as an active participant in shaping historical memory.

Spanning decades of conflict and social change, these images form a shared visual history. They remind us that history is rarely linear. Instead, its anxieties repeat, its structures reconfigure, and its unresolved tensions return—echoing into the present with renewed urgency.