Time-Machine Magic

Abstract

The Harvard Semitic Museum’s FOCUS Project and the quest to preserve the earliest accurate images of the most swiftly changing part of today’s world.“Sunlight and shadow are the same.” Quoting Emerson’s paradox, the late Ethel Roosevelt Derby opened a photographic laboratory she had established in the basement of the Harvard Semitic Museum in memory of her daughter, who had died young a few months before. That paradox succinctly summarizes the physical basis for photography and epitomizes as well something unique about culture and the human spirit: adversity often brings blessings “in disguise.”