SnapperTalk

What’s the longest exposure you’ve ever taken?
A few minutes maybe?

Well Gizmodo has an interview with a conceptual artist by the name of Jonathon Keats who is planning to take a 100 year exposure of a hotel room at the Hotel des Arts in San Francisco. Photographically the experiment is about as low tech as one can imagine – a handmade brass cylinder pinhole camera containing a sheet of “archivally-stable black paper, which will fade in the focused light of a pinhole projection over the next hundred years, producing a unique positive print”.

Conceptually, the purpose of the project is to explore time itself. It’s easy to forget how the invention of photography has enabled us to view slices of time in ways that were simply impossible to the generations before us. I’m thinking of both long-exposure and time-lapse photography that enables us to view the progress of time in a single image, and also of high-speed photography which essentially lets us view the world devoid of the dimension of time.

One thing’s for sure – in 2106 it’s going to create a few headaches for copyright lawyers in deciding when the photo was actually taken… if copyright still exists then.

Keats also has another strange experiment on the go – playing continuous tape loops of prayers from the three major monotheistic religions and a control loop of a talk radio station, to fruit flies and blue-green algae, in order to genetically classify God himself – but that’s… errr… for another time.