Photographer Jim Golden specializes in still life and product photography. He honed his craft in the New York advertising world before relocating to Portland, where he combined his two specialties to gorgeous effect in his latest project: Relics of Technology (which we spotted on The Verge). In Relics, Golden puts obsolete technology center stage, creating a beautifully arranged gallery that acts as a “Land of Misfit Toys” for the past toys of grown-ups.
Golden took two distinct routes with Relics. In the first, he created a series of gorgeous, high-quality GIFs that show (for the youths!) how things like rotary phones, slide projectors, and electric typewriters used to function. And for the second, he’s placed floppy discs (who remembered there were so many different kinds?), VHS tapes, and those mini-cassettes from your answering machine into pleasing patterns that would paper a hipster’s walls perfectly, or make for a beautifully ironic Facebook cover photo. Conspicuously absent from the project: laser discs, Hit Clips.
“The seeds for the Relics of Technology project started when I found a brick cellphone at a thrift store in rural Oregon,” Golden tells The Verge. “Since finding it, similar bits and pieces of old technology and media kept grabbing my attention. The fascination was equal parts nostalgia for the forms, and curiosity as to what had become of them.”
Sounds rosy and interesting, doesn’t it? Yet Golden leaves us and the project on an unsettling note of gloom: “These photos are reminders the progress has a price and our efforts have an expiration date.” With that, click on through the cobwebbed gallery of our expired efforts.
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden
Image Credit: Jim Golden