I’m not sure you’re ever going to capture the ‘movement’ of capital markets, because there’s not much to see…

—Bank Officer (unnamed hedge fund)

In the spring of 1845, William Henry Fox Talbot made four photographs of the Royal Exchange in London. What appears in these photographs is not only the nineteenth century edifice of a financial institution, but also an early limitation of the technology of photography itself: its inability to capture and clearly represent objects in movement. Beginning with this image of finance and the limitations of photography, In Place of Capital unfolds in the strange place between economic movements and the realm of pictorial representation after the invention of photography.