This Camera Is Taking a Thousand-Year Picture

Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, conceptual artist, and self-described fabulist at the University of Arizona. He's working on a novel approach to photography.

If you've studied the early history of that field, you might know that early daguerreotypes had very long exposure times, often a minute or more. One of the priorities of early photographic experimentation was to get that shutter speed down. But Keats is moving in the opposite direction. Smithsonian reports that his camera, which is already looking over a scenic landscape, will take a full thousand years to complete the exposure.

Appropriately, Keats selected to photograph Tumamoc Hill, which is the site of petroglyphs that may be 3,000 years old. It is a place with a long memory into human history. Keats hopes that his project, which he calls the Millennium Camera, will be able to complete its work far into our future.

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: University of Arizona Communications


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