100 Years Of Urban Changes Are The Focus For A Century Camera

Think of a snapshot, which we interpret as an instant in time. What would happen if you were to elongate that instant to an extreme: not seconds or minutes, but decades? Could you compress all that time into a single moment?

Artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats began exploring the idea with a camera he built to take a photo over a 100-year period. 

Back in 2010, GOOD asked Keats to come up with something special for The Slow issue of our print magazine. That’s when he hit on the idea of using magazine paper as a film stock.

“The idea was simple,” Keats said. “I’d combine the natural fading quality of paper with the simplicity of a pinhole camera.” There was just one catch. The “film” would fade slowly, meaning exposure times would have to be measured in years. The century camera, which required more than an average lifetime to take a single photo, was born.

The project touched a nerve, both for questions it invites about urban planning and decay — the way decisions about our cities affect how future generations interact with each other and their environment — and for the odd fact that no one participating would be alive to see any of the developed photos. If the cameras could successfully be fixed in one spot, the resulting images would not only show permanent objects, such as buildings, that endure through the years but would also show spectral vestiges of features that had been torn down or added partway through the exposure.

Keats has since expanded the project. Through his gallery exhibitions and partnerships with universities and museums, he has attracted hundreds of volunteers who have placed century cameras in cities around the world. More recently, Keats built two cameras out of gold and copper with a film stock that will take 1,000 years to produce an exposure. The project is intended to invite contemplation about the passing of time and our relationship with our environment and with generations future and past.

We got a chance to talk with Keats about the project that’s inspired people around the world to think beyond their lifetimes.

Why take a photograph over 100 years or 1,000 years in the case of the millennium camera?

It has to do with the nature of photography. An image is typically something that’s all at once. My thought was that by elongating that instant, you could see the entirety of 100 years in a single photograph. The most ephemeral stuff is erased. The resulting image allows a viewer to focus on these big aggregate changes.

The century cameras, and more recently the millennium cameras, have made news around the world, and you’ve thought a lot about how societies and cities in particular change over time. What inspired you to expand the project from the initial cutout cameras in the magazine?

After the initial camera was printed in GOOD, I was doing more and more work in Berlin. I was there every year, and I was observing gentrification. I was astounded by it. It stood out to me because I had this punctuated relationship with the city, a way of seeing it that those living there didn’t.

So I was thinking about how I might be able to see that change happening in my own city, and I thought the idea I had for GOOD might be turned into something slightly more organized and recontextualized.

I was thinking of the idea of surveillance. That was the jumping-off point. It all came together when I wondered what would happen if it was not the state but those most affected by the decisions we make with our cities who were the ones watching us. Members of future generations. So I began to look at these simple pinhole cameras as surveillance cameras where the not yet born were watching over us and giving us a sense of responsibility and paranoia. How might the processes of urban planning and decision-making be influenced?

In the first phase of this project, you gave cameras to volunteer participants at a gallery in Berlin. What was the reaction?

A number of people asked me where they should put them or wanted advice. I thought that was interesting, and I came to realize that the process of deciding where to put the camera was perhaps as powerful and important as being aware of the cameras recording what the city becomes. It was really a decision about what people cared enough about to record — either because of the desire that it remain the same for 100 years or out of an instinct to track how it changes.

Learn more at Good