Time
The Lick Observatory, built atop Mt. Hamilton in California in the 19th century, sent seventeen expeditions around the world to photograph eclipses between 1889 and 1932. One expedition to the Los Bronces Mine in Chile captured the total eclipse of the sun on April 16th, 1893 on an 8” x 10” glass plate negative, beautifully rendering the solar corona. The plate was archived and forgotten until the photographer Linda Connor found it in a box in a dusty corner of the observatory around 1997. She made a contact print from the plate and toned it with gold chloride for permanence. Some of her prints of the 1893 eclipse are now in the collection of the Whitney Museum. Kyoto Journal had published many of Connor’s photographs in previous issues, and when she showed us this print, we instantly thought it would make the perfect cover of our special issue on “Time.”
JA