How does the 1,000-year camera work?
Conventional cameras aren’t suitable for such longterm projects. They are sensitive to environmental conditions, and their technology will become obsolete.
“So the basic principle for the camera was to make it as simple as possible. No batteries because people will forget to change them. No moving parts because they’ll freeze up. So I decided to make a pinhole camera,” Keats said.
The simplicity of the camera, with a pin-sized hole in a thin 24-karat gold sheet as the aperture, minimizes potential mechanical failures. Durable materials, including a gold sheet and a small copper cylinder on a steel pole, are chosen for resilience.
The camera will create a distinctive, red and white monochrome image. The innovative use of sun-faded pigment, consisting of many layers of rose madder (a type of paint), avoids reliance on quick chemical reactions or digital technology and will allow it to capture images over an extended period.
“What I’m doing is using a phenomenon that we all know very well,” Keats said. “Anyone who’s ever had a magazine out on their coffee table for too long, or a poster on their wall, sees all of the colors fade. So that’s the idea, colors fade over time in the sunlight because of the effect the solar radiation has on those dyes and pigments.”
Keats likens the expected outcome to the blur observed around moving objects in sports photography.
Keats said there’s no guarantee that a perfect image will be produced. The landscape is unstable. There could be a natural disaster. Someone could steal the camera.
“But to me, that’s also a picture. It’s a picture of the world in terms of the social conditions in which we live. So ultimately, I’m not in charge here. I’m just setting up the conditions with myriad ways in which one might interact,” Keats said.