ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the view that Sraffa’s price equations are best interpreted as a ‘photograph’ of the economic system taken at a given moment of time, as Alessandro Roncaglia has argued. The chapter shows that Sraffa himself used the metaphor in his preparatory notes leading up to his 1960 book and did so with the explicit intention to discriminate the Classical approach to the problem of value and distribution from the marginalist one. While the former analyses a given system of production with regard to its properties concerning income distribution and relative prices, the latter confronts the given system with an imagined adjacent system, as is reflected in concepts such as marginal productivity and marginal cost. The metaphor of the photograph was meant to express the focus on a given system and the absence of change.
