Notes On Time
by Julia Conrad
an essay from the book


On October 28th, 2021, around 10:43 AM, the photographer Terry Ratzlaff was searching for a

derailed train when he happened to pass the Arp Clock and Wood Shop. The train was part of a

larger project inspired by the railfan communities that stud the country and the globe, minutely

studying passing trains. Trains, like photography, have a surprising amount in common with

clocks. Each altered the human relationship to time. In the early 19th century, time was often

rooted in each town’s central clock. The time was displayed prominently, tracking the hour based

on a sundial’s measure of the earth’s orbit. Sundial time is staggered by four minutes for each

longitudinal degree, meaning one town might differ by ten or twenty minutes from the one

nearby. For this, train collisions were common in the 1800s.


The adoption of time zones—called railway time—took place across the world at intervals. The

change happened in the United States on November 18, 1883. On “The Day of Two Noons,”

time shifted into sharper focus: away from the sun and towards globalization. Ratzlaff, who in

projects like The Watcher and Take Your Time, had explored the way trains inherently signify

time, desire, and order, and in turn inspire responses of collection and obsession, was distracted

from his search for the derailed train by the Clock Shop’s anachrony. Even in a small village like

Bennet, Nebraska––founded in 1871 next to a railroad stop––the building stuck out. Built by the

Arp family in 1985, it looked like a cross between a Midwest warehouse and a Swiss chalet.

There was a fourteen-foot street clock outside, and a curved cupola on its roof, housing a speaker

that would play the recorded chimes of Big Ben.


If simply looking at the Arp Clock and Wood Shop felt like time travel, pushing open its door

was to bend time in folds. The air in the Clock Shop was coated by a chorus of ticking, different

second hands layering over each other in polyrhythms. 11AM chimed at staggered moments,

syncopated against the swing of pendulums. At the front of the shop, Jean Arp was working on

the bookkeeping, in the company of clocks for sale: Grandfather clocks, wall clocks, cuckoo

clocks, pendulum clocks, quartz clocks. Jean, an accountant, had been an early adopter of online

retail: she had transformed the small Bennet shop into a resource for clock seekers across the

globe.


“For what is time?” Saint Augustine wrote, over 1,600 years ago. “Who can readily and briefly

explain it? Who can comprehend it enough to utter a word about it? But what in conversation do

we mention more familiarly and knowingly, than time?” Time may be an old theme, but the

question feels pressing in the global capitalist hyper-synchrony of the 21st century. Reminders of

the time are constantly in our peripheral vision, yet it feels especially elusive. There is never

enough of it, but for what purpose, exactly?


The back of the shop was preceded by the soft tinkle of music on the radio, the sound like a trail

leading past shelving units of tools, work tables, cardboard boxes, filing cabinets, woods scraps,

to the workroom where the clockmaker Gregory Arp was quietly immersed in time: what it is

made of, what it means to care for it. There was a quiet philosophy to every detail of the Clock

Shop: “We are currently about 11 months behind in our clock repair,” a sign at the front read.

“We regret this delay, but there are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in theweek. 

We take the time to give each clock  the best service possible. Thank you for your patience.”


Gregory Arp, the son of a farmer, was born in 1945 and grew up in Carpenter, Wyoming. He

grew up with the mentality—now as rare as clockmaking—that nothing should go to waste.

From a young age, Greg wanted to understand how things worked, and how he could make them

from scratch himself, starting with farm equipment. He met Jean in college and eventually

earned an MS degree in plant breeding and genetics. They had two sons, Tyson and Jarvis, and

he worked as a school custodian, spending his free time restoring antique cars, growing orchids,

making stained glass, and building fishponds. Then, at thirty-three, he taught himself how to

build clocks, and his life swerved course.


For the Arps, opening the Clock Shop was a reconsideration of both free time and labor. “Self-

sufficiency is our goal,” Greg Arp said in an interview about the benefits of self-employment.

“There’s lots of people around who make three times as much as we do and can’t seem to make

it. We get along fine.” The shop had been running for over thirty-five years when Ratzlaff first

photographed it. Like clockwork, Arp started the day at eight, then worked till twelve, an hour

break for lunch, then again from one to five. Over the course of his lifetime, Gregory Arp

repaired over five thousand clocks.


Ratzlaff’s first meeting with the clock master would lead to a two-year collaboration. Ratzlaff

stayed for hours while Arp worked at a table scattered with plyers and needle-thin tools. The

former photographing everything that caught his attention—wood piles, whiskey barrels to be

made into clocks, plyers, reamers, brass teeth, coffee cups, springs, Greg, washers, smocks,

newspapers, flies, spiders, years of dust. He was drawn to the way Arp’s tools coexisted with a

lifetime of material, how that material in turn became time pieces. For Greg, nearly everything

was—or might be—repurposed, so he kept everything, and Ratzlaff photographed it. A paper

plate made into a clock. Nine acorns in a box. “You’re like a mosquito at a nude beach,” Arp

quipped at Ratzlaff’s interest in every detail. He nicknamed him the Clock Shop’s “Artist in

Residence.”


A camera would seem to be a clock’s opposite. A clock makes time move forward; a camera

suspends it in place. Instead, in Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes that “a camera is a clock

for seeing.” A camera can measure the ephemeral, track time’s movement visually. The

Marches—inspired by Greg’s motto that “time marches on”displays this view. Through

repetition and a range of photography styles, the project coils around multiple themes,

deconstructing what a clock means, and what the value of time is.

“Everybody knows from


experience how intimate a ticking clock can make a place feel,” writes Jean Baudrillard. “The

reason is that the clocks’ sound assimilates the place to the inside of our own body. The clock is a

mechanical heart that reassures us about our own heart.”


This explains the uncanny poignancy of Ratzlaff’s photographs of clock parts: their hands, their

faces, their bodies, their interior organs and exterior adornment, and the way they are sometimes

passed down through generations. Greg Arp understood that clocks do not measure time in

isolation from the human relationship to them. He wryly gestured to this in the way he spoke, or

the note he gave new owners: “We are confident that this original, hand-crafted clock will add

character and charm to your home and that you and your family will be rewarded with a lifetime

of pleasurable memories, ” the note read, explaining how to turn the hands back to make time run

forward.Clockmaking was not a dying profession when Arp taught it to himself in the early 1980s, but by

2023, the year of his death, Arp was one of the last clockmakers in the region. That fact made the

Clock Shop a time capsule, in multiple senses. Gesualdo Bufalino writes in the essay “Extinct

Professions” that “a civilization’s richness is in its professions. Each trade a single cell with its

own routines, language, conduct, teachings, moral codes and tales of disaster.” Looking at each

photograph, I am reminded not just of clockmaking, but of other extinct professions: umbrella

repairers, elevator operators, professional mourners; worlds unto themselves, values of a time

now gone.


When I met Ratzlaff in May 2023, he showed me the sign about being behind on clock repair,

and how “there are only so many hours in the day.” The phrase stuck to my ribs when he told me

about Greg Arp passing away one month before. At the time, Ratzlaff was going in daily with the

aim of archiving the entirety of the Shop’s contents, to preserve it permanently. The project had

already spanned over years—“I hoped I would work on it for the rest of my life” Ratzlaff once

wrote—but now his time at the Clock Shop was finite. Without Arp to wind the clocks, the

chorus of ticking had fallen slowly into silence. Photographing alone in the rooms, hours sliding

by, took on new meaning. The work turned into an inventory, a collection, a lifetime, an extinct

profession, a person, an inheritance.


Some types of obsolescence are necessary, slate-clearing for a new age. You cannot let the past

simply accumulate without decay or memorialize every item that is the last of its kind. But The

Marches does not romanticize or ache with nostalgia. Instead, it is a humble examination of what

is lost when a clock shop shuts down, its contents sold or scrapped, and what it is that remains. In

Jean Arp’s email announcing Greg’s untimely death, she thanked their community for the

“privilege of caring for your clocks.” The Marches makes an aesthetic of that caring labor. There

are, in Ratzlaff’s digital archive, over 5,000 images. 861 clock-hands, laid out on a page. Family

photos of building the Clock Shop. Model clocks to teach home-schooled children in Bennet.

Years lined into a knot of wood. The steady focus in Arp’s blue eye, magnified as he works.