The simple American Camera was placed on Tumamoc Hill to record changes in the landscape over a millennium.
The Millennium Camera sits on a stilt in Tumamoc Hill. Photo: Chris Richards/University Communications
Philosopher Jonathan Keats of the Arizona College of Fine Arts and a team at the Desert Laboratory are developing the "Millennium Camera" project to take the world's slowest photo, New Atlas reported on January 10. They placed the camera on top of Tumamoc Hill in Tucson, Arizona, to capture the surrounding landscape with a record-long exposure time of up to 1,000 years.
Designing a camera that will last 1,000 years is no easy task. According to Keats, simplicity is the key to longevity. The Millennium Camera is a classic pinhole camera design. It consists of a brass cylinder with a thin 24-karat gold plate at one end, with a small hole punched in it. Light passes through the hole and hits a light-sensitive surface inside the camera, which is coated with thin layers of an oil-based pigment called rose madder.
The Millennium Camera is mounted on a steel pole, located near a bench along a walking path on Tumamoc Hill. Next to it is a sign explaining the project's purpose.
Over the course of 1,000 years, light reflected from the landscape will gradually impact the light-sensitive surface inside the camera. Controlled exposures will slowly fade the pigment at different rates. Darker areas, such as hills, will fade more slowly than brighter areas, such as the sky. When people in the future view the image, it will be a unique record of what has changed and what has stayed the same over this time period.
So what would the image look like? “Let’s say all the houses were demolished in 500 years. The mountains would be clear, crisp and rich, and the houses would be ghostly,” Keats says.
Keats plans to install more Millennium Cameras in the area, facing different directions. He also plans to install them in other places around the world, including Griffith Park in Los Angeles, USA, locations in China and the Austrian Alps.
Thu Thao (According to New Atlas )
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