El carpintero is a photographic project by Ricardo Cases that reflects on the nature of time through repetition and subtle variation. For months, the photographer had daily access to a carpenter's workshop during the hours when the carpenter rested. The project transforms an ordinary, everyday act into a meditation on cyclical time, in which each day resembles the one before, yet is never exactly the same.

Through this daily visual record, Cases explores our perception of the everyday, the passage of time, and the rhythms of life. He challenges photography’s conventional role as a means of capturing fleeting moments, instead stretching time until it takes on a sculptural quality. The project suggests that meaning, memory, and even progress do not emerge from constant change, but from the quiet persistence of routine and the subtle differences that accumulate over time.

“They say it is each hour we spend awake, inside our bodies, that makes us older; if we could sleep 23 hours a day, it would take us 32 years to learn to walk and 300 to become adults; all of humanity would advance much more slowly, perhaps even eventually becoming extinct. There are also those who maintain that each hour of sleep rejuvenates by an hour; in this way, by sleeping more than twelve hours a day we would actually be reversing time and could, through this process, achieve immortality. That is why the body, in its wisdom, lets us sleep less as we get older: because the body wants to die someday”.

Excerpt from the text by Luis López Navarro for the book El carpintero.

ISBN 978-84-09-88392-9
Dalpine, torch press, The Ice Plant, 2026
Photographs: Ricardo Cases
Text: Luis López Navarro
Translation into. English: Mike Slack
Translation into Japanese: Ayaha Ikezawa
Design: Tipode Office
Post-production: Arena Retouch
Printing: Impresum
Softcover with flaps
29,7 x 19,4 cm
144 pages
Languages: Spanish/Japanese/English