Eight Years

The photograph that made itself

In 2012, Regina Valkenborgh fixed a cider can to the outside of a telescope dome at Bayfordbury Observatory in Hertfordshire. Inside the can was a sheet of photographic paper. She had made a pinhole camera: the simplest possible photographic instrument, a lightproof container with a hole small enough to project an image onto the surface inside. She pointed it at the sky and left it there.

Then she forgot about it.

This is not an oversight to be embarrassed by. It is the condition that made the photograph possible. For the next eight years, through summer and winter, through cloud and clear sky, through 2,953 sunrises and the same number of sunsets, the camera continued to do exactly what it had been built to do. No one adjusted it. No one checked it. No one intervened. Light fell through the pinhole and accumulated on the paper inside, day after day, year after year, tracing the sun’s arc across the sky in a line so faint it was invisible until the total had been building long enough to matter.

In 2020, David Campbell, Bayfordbury Observatory's Principal Technical Officer found the can still attached to the dome. When Valkenborgh opened it and processed the paper inside, she found an image that had been making itself, quietly and without supervision, for nearly a decade.

Time as the medium

Most photographs measure time in fractions of a second. A fast shutter freezes motion. A slow one blurs it. Even a long exposure, the kind that turns a city at night into streaming light trails, typically runs for seconds or minutes. The relationship between time and the photographic image is understood as a technical variable to be controlled: you choose how much time to give the exposure, and the choice determines what you get.

Valkenborgh’s image does not work this way. The eight years were not a deliberate artistic decision in the conventional sense. There was no calculation of what eight years of light would produce. Time here is not a variable. It is the medium itself. The photograph is not an image made in time. It is an image made of time, composed entirely of accumulated light across nearly 3,000 days. Each of the 2,953 arcs visible in the final image is one day’s worth of the sun’s path, from the moment it clears the horizon to the moment it sets. Together they form a record of eight years of the Earth’s orbit, compressed into a single sheet of paper.

The arcs are not identical. The sun’s path changes with the seasons: higher in summer, lower in winter, the arcs shortening and lengthening in a rhythm that has been repeating since before there was anyone to record it. You can read the seasons in the image the way you read rings in a cross-section of a tree. The gaps where arcs are absent or broken mark the days when cloud cover interrupted the exposure. Weather is in the photograph. Eight winters are in the photograph. The slow wobble of the planet is in the photograph.

What serendipity made possible

The word that appears in accounts of Valkenborgh’s work is serendipity, and it is the right word, but it requires precision. The serendipity was not luck in the simple sense. It was the combination of an artist who understood what a pinhole camera does, an institution patient enough to leave a can on a dome for eight years without noticing, and a technician who thought to keep it rather than throw it away. Any one of those elements failing and the photograph does not exist.

What serendipity produced, in this case, was a kind of proof: that photography does not require the photographer to be present. Once the camera is set and the paper is inside, the image-making process is autonomous. Light does the work. Time does the work. The photographer’s role in an eight-year exposure is to begin and to end, and to leave everything in between to the physics of light on paper. This is photography stripped to its minimum human intervention, and what it reveals is extraordinary.

Why this is a Point Zero

The Zero Baseline entry for Perpetuity establishes a Point Zero at the furthest temporal boundary of the photographic medium: the longest exposure in the history of photography. But the significance of this Point Zero is not the record itself. It is what the record demonstrates about the definition of a photograph.

If a photograph can take eight years to make, then the temporal boundaries of the medium are effectively unlimited. The minimum is a nanosecond, in scientific imaging. The maximum is, apparently, at least eight years and possibly longer. What sits between those two extremes is not a collection of different techniques but a single continuous principle: light, acting on a photosensitive surface, over time. Valkenborgh’s image does not stretch that principle to its breaking point. It demonstrates its elasticity. And in doing so it asks every photographer, and every viewer, a question that most of us never think to ask: how much time does an image need?

The verification parameters hold completely. The image is authentic, photographic in technique, contextually significant, and genuinely inaugural. The four-parameter standard was not designed with an eight-year exposure in mind. That it holds anyway is a sign of a methodology built on principle rather than precedent.

Photography happening now

The entries that anchor the From the Collection series ask the same fundamental question from a different position in time and through a different technical act. What is a photograph? What can it preserve? What does it prove?

What makes Valkenborgh’s entry different from the others is that she is here. A living artist, working now, extending the definition of the medium in real time. Perpetuity arrived in this collection not as a historical document but as a living argument: that photography is still discovering what it is capable of, that the boundary between art and scientific observation is still prolific, and that the most radical experiments in the medium are sometimes the simplest ones.

A cider can. A sheet of paper. A pinhole. Eight years of light. That is all it took to make the longest exposure in photographic history, and to ask, with quiet precision, what time looks like when you finally stop to see it.

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Image credit: © Regina Valkenborgh, Perpetuity, 2020. Digital positive from paper negative. Used with permission of the artist.

© 2026 Patricia von Ah — Zero Baseline of Photography, SEETHINK Lab. All rights reserved.