From the age of muscle to the age of the machine, and now to the age of the algorithm. The trajectory of human civilization is a natural history of how the corporeality of labor has been transformed, extracted, and finally rendered invisible. Hannah Arendt described labor as the activity that is consumed in the sustaining of life and leaves nothing behind. Civilization is the structure erected upon that consumption, and what this exhibition holds in its gaze is precisely its residue. Labor has not disappeared. It has merely receded from the field of vision of the capital that uses it, and been erased from the eye of the consumer. Photography is the oldest technology of resistance to that erasure—and, today, a technology that also participates in it.

In 1913, at a cannery in Bluffton, South Carolina, Lewis Hine photographed a seven-year-old oyster shucker. His caption reads: "7-year old Rosie. Regular oyster shucker. Her second year at it. Illiterate. Works all day." A century later a researcher traced the census records and recovered her name: Rose Berdych, who by 1920 was in school and able to read and write, and who died in 1990 at the age of eighty-four. Where the caption had written only "illiterate," there stood an entire human life. The ethics of documentary photography lie not in the force of its indictment but in this possibility of restitution. [...]