In a remote corner of the Arizona desert, a one-of-a-kind camera, the Millennium Camera, is about to embark on a long exposure that will last an entire millennium, capturing the slow metamorphosis of the landscape in a single, historic image.
Designed by Jonathon Keats, an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts, this pinhole camera represents a fusion of art and science. With a noble and ambitious goal: to create a visual time capsule that can show future inhabitants of Tucson what has changed, and what has remained unchanged over time. An artistic-scientific project (that I link to you here) with its poetic charge, which caught my attention.
A bridge between past and future
The Millennium Camera is rooted in past traditions to look far into the future. Its structure is inspired by the oldest form of camera ever invented, the camera obscura, which has around a thousand years of history.
A thousand years, yes. Just like the period of time that this long exposure shot aims to document.
Its realization? It's artisanal. It comprises a copper cylinder with a thin sheet of 24-karat gold in which a tiny hole has been drilled. Through this hole, sunlight hits a light-sensitive surface on the back, coated in rose madder oil pigment, for a looong, long exposure. The longest ever.
The slowest photography in the world
Mounted on a steel pole and aimed at a neighborhood in Tucson, the Millennium Camera uses controlled exposure to blend pigment to varying degrees. Darker areas, such as mountains, will fade more slowly than brighter areas, such as the sky.
If all goes according to plan, the result will be an image that develops over a thousand years.
This project will, of course, spark the imagination of future observers. They will have to scrutinize the long-exposure image to disentangle the more stable elements of the landscape from those that are constantly changing, such as buildings. Keats emphasizes that the transience of man-made objects will be visible based on their permanence over time.
A house that exists for “only” five hundred years, for example, will be a transparent ghost compared to the permanent features of the landscape.
A thousand years of long exposure, challenges and hopes of a thousand-year experiment
The success of this experiment depends on the camera's ability to remain immobile until the 31st century, a time frame in which natural disasters or human interventions could occur that could compromise the project. There is a risk that the area will be razed to make way for new construction (or that humanity itself can disappear). Yet regardless of the Millennium Chamber's physical survival, its true purpose is to stimulate people in the present to think about the future.
The camera that will take the long-exposure photo is set up near a bench along a hiking trail on Tumamoc Hill, accompanied by a sign explaining its purpose. Passers-by can gaze across the valley and contemplate what it will look like in 3023, inspired by Keats's words that invite us to consider not only a potentially dark future, but also the infinite possibilities that lie before us, urging us to act today to shape tomorrow .
Keats plans to install other Millennium Cameras in the area, oriented in different directions, as well as in other significant locations such as Griffith Park in Los Angeles, China and the Austrian Alps. An artistic and philosophical exploration that is projected across the centuries, and challenges us to become aware custodians of our environment and its transformations over time.
