Timeslip

 

More fragments of frozen time unearthed today: a box of 35mm slides that have been buried in the spare bedroom for I don't know how long. Judging by the image content, either this was one film that had been in the camera from 1992-1997 or my slides need a good sorting out!

This is kind of a three-part time-out-of-time post: the slide featured in the picture is of comet Hale Bopp seen over the roof of the house we used to live in at Brynbella, taken on time-lapse sometime just after it reached its last perihelion: the film was processed in June 1997, so it can't be far past its closest point, on April 1st that year. By August 7th 2012, it was 33.2 Astronomical Units from the Sun, a distance of over three billion miles. By now it will be indistinguishable against the cosmic background.

The transparency is photographed in my Dad's old handheld slide viewer, a Paterson from the early 1960s, which still sports a crude repair Dad made in the late sixties, when the catch on the lid broke: it's still held together with the same bit of old wire. The lamp in this thing hasn't been changed since that time, and I've just put a fresh set of batteries into it, the previous pair having lasted since the 1970s. I know this thing doesn't exactly get daily use, but I think it's probably paid for itself by now, both personally and environmentally: throwaway culture? We didn't know the meaning of the phrase then.

Slices of time, personal and cosmological; held together in my hand and now recreated as a completely new digital artefact in the image above: I find this circularity, and the connections it makes, fascinating and humbling in equal measure.