Museum of the Last Time
A museum of last times, assembled from your own photographs.
What it does
- Reads your photo library and finds the things that stopped — a couch, a street, a camera, a stretch of months with nothing in it.
- Gives each one a placard, an accession number and a date.
- Hangs one of them a day, then closes the building behind you.
- Says so when it is guessing, and lets you correct it.
Nothing is called final until it has been silent for far longer than it was ever quiet. One afternoon somewhere is not a place you lost.
Est. on this device
The Museum of the Last Time holds the final appearance of things.
Not the first time — everyone keeps those. The last: the last photograph of a couch, of a street you used to walk, of a car, of a kitchen you no longer stand in. These are almost never recognised at the time. They are taken carelessly, in bad light, with a thumb in the frame.
At the doors
The four wings
Places no longer visited
Somewhere you went, repeatedly, and then did not go again.
Hall of final appearances
Things that appear in the collection many times, and then never.
The cabinet of instruments
The cameras. Each one stopped on a particular afternoon.
The long silences
Intervals in which the collection records nothing at all.
Notices posted in the building
On the lighting
The Museum is kept dark in both appearances. Galleries showing photographs are lit to about 50 lux, because light fades them. Nothing here can actually fade. The Museum observes the practice anyway.
Room 050
On being wrong
Records marked “attributed” were assembled partly by resemblance. The Museum may have gathered two similar things under one name. Where it can, it separates them by where they were photographed — two grey couches in two apartments are two couches, whatever they look like. Where it cannot, it says so, and you may correct it.
Museum of the Last Time
Accession numbers
Numbered for the day a thing ended and the number of times it happened. 1987.11.03.001 ended on 3 November 1987, having appeared once.
Deaccession
A record the Museum has been corrected on is kept anyway, marked. A museum which discards its errors is not keeping records, only opinions.
Screenshots are not photographs of anywhere and are left out. Where the same subject turns up twice, the Museum keeps whichever ended more decisively and lets the other go.