days at homeWolfgang Hastert

Take pictures of(not necessarily in this order):

Walk with dad in the middle of winter

Our garden—everything snowed in

Same walk with Dad/ Spring time(remember where we stopped and studied the trees)

Breakfast, Dad taking his pills

Pretend—as if I were a boy again/Looking up at Mom & Dad (try low angle shoot)

Mom & Dad together (difficult)

My father, my son

Dad’s shoes on the rack—drying

My small and trusted alarm clock

Cleaning up at the orchard with Mom

Dad’s tools—all in order

When everyone sleeps—the flash freezes time at night

Pictures of me and the street gang

At the cemetary with Mom

My tools for recording time,memories and dreams:

Dad’s old ZEISS NETTAR camera

My HOLGA pinhole camera

Use the old NIZO Super 8 camera— 24 frames per second! (only two rolls of KODAK Tri–X left)

How will I get the film rolls through airport security on my way home to California?

visits back home

december 8–22may 18–30august 26–september 21stseptember 28–october 3rd

Imagine a world in which there is no time—only images.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back to memories and some propel us forward to our dreams.

1 Back home, the world is arranged by mechanical time.

Each day at the same time the meals are prepared.

Lunch is eaten exactly at 11:30. Medicine is taken

after each meal. Occasionally, there is a short glimpse

of “body time” when one listens to their heart beat

and to the rhythms of desire. A time when family

talks about childhood pranks and memories. And the

laughter of the neighborhood kids during the long

days of summertime.

( 4 page spread )

2Cameras have something in common with clocks:

They are machines for measuring time, allowing

light for a split second to travel through the shutter

and expose the film. For the pinhole image, time is

not controlled by the mechanics of the apparatus

but by the hand of the operator who spends time

with his subjects.

3Every person lives in their own time back home.

All clocks tick at different rates. In the time for

a leaf to fall in one person’s life, a flower could

bloom in another’s.

4The world at home is arranged. During the dark

silence of the night, the instant of a camera flash

illuminates the dark for a split second and

records memories of the father and child.

5The mother wants the child to be at home. For her,

he is still an infant, as if no time has passed since

birth. But the child has grown older and moved

away. For the mother, the change in time is visible.

Birthdays, marriages, and death are the true sign

posts for time passing.

( 4 page spread )

6Time is not continuous. It stops and starts in little

flickering increments as it is recorded at 24 frames

per second and pretends to show real time.

7For the child time moves slowly. It rushes from

moment to moment. The child is barely able to wait

for the rest of his life. Whereas the elderly wish to

halt time as it darts by so quickly.

Late September 2010

When I was sitting next to my father’s

bedside, he said to me in one of our last

conversations: “I wish I could turn the

clock back some years. I reckon, I was

once like you are now.”

I wish to thank

Jenny Yoshida Park and Arno Rafael Minkkinenfor mentoring the making of this book

Alan Lightman for inspiring my thinking about time through his novel Einstein’s Dreams

About the making of the book

All images were shot on film and then processed and digitally scanned at Chrome in San Diego.

The paper is Moab Entrada Rag Bright 190 gr.

Days At Home was printed and bound at Evidence of the Hand by Jenny Yoshida Park in San Diego.

Edition of one, November 2010

Design by Wolfgang Hastert

Image & Text © copyright 2010Wolfgang Hastert

filmgang books, San Diegowww.wolfganghastert.net