Walter’s Flashlights (2023)

Installation from Flashlights

Flashlights from the collection of the late Walter Melvin (1942-2022) hardwired to be plugged into the wall and turned on with a single switch.

Walter Melvin was my girlfriend Maya’s grandmother’s boyfriend. They had a beautiful love story, though it is not mine to tell. They had a ski resort romance some 50 years ago and kept in touch occasionally over the ensuing decades while they were both in other marriages. Then during the pandemic, both of them now single in their late 70s, they decided to move across the country to be together. They bought a house in Michigan and moved in together. They got to spend two years together, before Walter passed away in October 2022.

I met Walter once, over a long weekend in Cape Cod and found intriguing commonalities with him. He grew up in western Maine, near the small town where I lived and “studied abroad” in 2020. He even worked at the nearby paper mill I photographed and explored there when he was a teenager. He spent his life saving historic buildings from demolition, as the head of a successful restorative architecture firm in New York City.

On a long drive to the airport, he mentioned his collection of vintage flashlights. Maya and I inquired further and he explained that it was one of his hobbies, collecting flashlights. His collection was once in the thousands, though he only had a handful left at their new house. He built up his collection over many years at flashlight swap meets with other collectors. We were thrilled to learn this fact about him.

A few months later, Walter passed away.

Maya’s grandma Mary sent us a box full of flashlights a few weeks after he passed. She had been going through his things with his family, and I guess nobody was interested in keeping the flashlights.

We were honored to be the recipients of his collection. They were really unique objects. We put them on display in our living room, organized into little groupings, like soldiers. It was a shame, though, that most of them didn’t work. Or at least, we didn’t have the batteries to replacement bulbs to make them work. So there they sat for months, unlit.

I imagined them all lit up in their cubby holes. I considered how this could be done. Would it be possible to power a flashlight through a wall outlet? I brought the idea up to Maya and she was okay with me experimenting with the flashlights.

First, I arranged the flashlights out on a small board, and drilled holes into the bottom of each one for the wires to pass through and to screw them down. It was sort of like arranging a still life.

Then it took a lot of trial and error for me to figure out how to hardwire each flashlight. There was a lot of circuitry and wires involved, so I built hollow wooden shelves to hide all the electronics.

For each flashlight, I found the old battery contact points, and soldered a positive and negative wire to each one. On some flashlights, however, the bottom of the bulb simply made direct contact with the tip of the battery. Instead of soldering directly onto the bulb (rendering it un-replaceable) I had to make dummy batteries out of dowels with a nail as the contact point and solder a wire onto the nail.

At first I thought I could simply wire all the bulbs to a single power transformer, but I soon found that would require a very specific transformer with a low voltage and high amperage. The solution I came up with instead was to use individual small step-down transformers for each flashlight. I bought all these cheapo (yellow) 120v to 5v step down transformer boards online and eventually they all stopped working and I had to replace them with more expensive ones (blue).

The smaller ones were the trickiest to wire.

I made two more shelves for my show at In Concert.

All lit up in my studio for the first time.