One Photograph. One Year. Nothing Else.

On radical limitation, the weight of a single image, and what happens when you stop reaching for the camera

Pinhole camera for 1-year exposure. Photo by the author.

You have taken more photographs in the last month than your grandparents took in a lifetime. Most of them, you will never look at again.

I want to tell you about a different way.

At the beginning of each year, black envelopes arrive at my door. Inside each one lies a single sheet of photographic paper — exposed continuously for twelve months.

It is only paper. And yet it holds the weight of an entire year. A year in which someone lived, doubted, hoped. A year compressed into light.

Twenty years ago, I designed a pinhole camera that does exactly this: it exposes one single image over the course of a full year. The camera sits somewhere inside a home — perhaps where the first morning light falls across the floor, or in a corner where evening shadows settle and stay.

It does not record events. It does not document the spectacular.

It simply registers that time passes.

Exposure time: One year. 2009. Photo by the author.

Exposure time: One year. 2010. Photo by the author.

The Physics of a Year

People move through the room, but they leave almost no visible trace. What remains is a condensation of light. Days accumulate. Brightness becomes color; repetition becomes structure. A year appears not as a sequence of moments, but as a single, continuous presence.

The technique traces back to Nicéphore Niépce, who in 1816 began experimenting with paper coated in silver salts. His early images — which he called “Rétines” — were never fixed. The very light that formed them eventually erased them.

A quiet paradox that has always stayed with me: the medium carries its own impermanence within it. Light creates. Light destroys.

In my process, the paper darkens slowly over an entire year. Only when the sheet is scanned does the image become permanent. The digital step draws a line: up to this moment, time was allowed to act freely. After it, the image is frozen.

I think about that boundary often. There is something almost violent about it — and something necessary.

Exposure time: One year. 2011. Photo by the author.

The Question I Keep Asking

Can you imagine going an entire year without taking any other photograph? No smartphone snapshots. No casual images. No documentation of your dinner or your view from the window.

For most people, this is almost inconceivable. We live in a culture of relentless documentation. We reach for the camera faster than we reach for attention. We accumulate images as if quantity were memory — as if more pictures might somehow protect us from losing the moments they try to capture.

But I wonder sometimes: what are we actually losing in the process?

A man I know — now a close friend — decided to find out.

Exposure time: One year. 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017. Photo by Patrick Zajfert.

Exposure time: One year. 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. In the annual photo, you can see the framed pictures from the previous year. Photo by Patrick Zajfert.

One Man, One Frame

Years ago, he consciously chose this limitation. Since then, he has made only this one photograph each year.

“Life has become more intense,” he once wrote to me.

No manifesto. No philosophy lecture. Just that quiet observation, in a short letter.

While his image is forming throughout the year, he keeps notes. Brief entries: a date, an observation, a question he could not answer. At the end of the year, he frames the finished photograph and places the folded notes inside an envelope behind it. Each image represents a year of his life. A row of frames on the wall — a row of years.

From time to time, he takes down one of the older frames. He looks at the image. He reads the notes. The memory does not return as a flood — it returns as something quieter. A resonance. The light of that year meets the light of now.

I have never been able to shake that image: a man standing in front of his wall of years, reading his own handwriting from a decade ago.

Exposure time: One year. 2012. Photo by the author.

Exposure time: One year. 2013. Photo by the author.

Perhaps there is a simple insight buried in all of this: intensity does not come from multiplication. It comes from limitation.

A year cannot be fully captured — not in a thousand images, not in ten thousand. But perhaps something true about it can survive in a single one, if that image is given enough time and silence to become what it needs to become.

You don’t need a pinhole camera to try this. You could simply decide, starting today, to take one photograph this week. One. And spend the rest of the time just looking.

What we constantly try to capture loses its weight.

What we allow to unfold gains depth

The 2025 annual photo with the already scanned negative. Photo by the author.”

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