Time Capsule

Time Capsule reflects on legacy and the uncertain future of analog archives. While the hope is that photographs will be passed down for generations, they can also become a burden. As I began to think about my legacy and pare down the thousands of slides accumulated over my photographic career, I questioned what survives of a life’s work once its initial function fades.

As a magazine photographer, I routinely examined changing natural conditions— light, wind, tides, and weather— to create carefully controlled photographs. For Time Capsule, however, nature became a close collaborator rather than a subject to be observed. Using slides I was ready to discard, I immersed them in seawater and allowed them to sit for two years, during which they underwent chemical and physical changes caused by salt and temperature. The slides morphed into abstracted color and form, often in unexpectedly magical ways. No longer describing the world I once photographed, the images continue to reflect something true: how time edits, reorders, and remakes everything we believe to be fixed. Even as the slides lose their original clarity, they gain new meaning, becoming time capsules— shaped by chance, altered by nature, and paradoxically renewed through their destruction.