Everything needs explaining, but perhaps this more than most.
I had been thinking about the daguerreotype and its relationship to the ephemeral, how the antiquity of the process highlighted the transient nature of its subject.
I began to consider what might be the shortest yet most vibrant instance available to this medium and then the thought occurred to me to construct this device.
In a darkroom a sensitized daguerreotype plate is placed on top of the box.
A firecracker is placed on top of the plate and then a piece of black anodized aluminum is secured over that. The firecracker is set off. The resulting explosion blows a hole in the aluminum preserving the shape of the escaping energy and the light of the explosion exposes the daguerreotype plate creating an image of the release of the light.

The daguerreotype is then placed in a case and kept in the drawer in the lower portion of the box. The whole unit becomes a reliquary of that instant, preserving artifacts of a moment that was over almost as soon as it began.

One of the things which fascinated me about the images which result from these explosions is their strong resemblance to astronomical photographs, particularly images of stellar nebula, the birth and death of stars.

In the Hindu religion there is the concept of the kalpa, an impossibly long period in which a world exists. These kalpa (there are a multitude of them) are subject to constant destructions and recreations, like the breathing in and breathing out of some infinite force.

Some day I'd like to create an installation with a large number of these boxes as a gesture of acknowledgment of how the eternal manifests through the temporal.