EPCOT 35MM: A Photographic Celebration of Epcot

Editor’s Note:
Please join me in welcoming Erica Rose with her first, of I hope many, contributing posts here at WorldKey. Today, Erica helps us wrap up 2017 with a look back at EPCOT Center in her spectacular 35mm film photographs. We hope you had a great holiday season and have a fantastic 2018!
— Andy

“Its always fun looking back at tomorrow…” 

-Horizons, EPCOT Center (1983 – 1999)

 

Oh, hello there! So glad you could come along… I’m Erica and a guest contributor here on WorldKey.

By my introduction, its safe to assume that I’m one of those classic EPCOT Center aficionados. Growing up in Florida, Walt Disney World, and especially EPCOT Center (as it was called when I was a kid), was very special to me. The park showed me that nearly anything is possible. In just one day at EPCOT Center, you could journey around the world, go millions of years back to the time of the dinosaurs, and catch a glimpse of a possible future through new innovations. EPCOT Center showed me things and places I never knew I wanted to explore – its a forever kind of love that has lived on, even when most of my favorite attractions have long since closed.

 

 

Now as an adult, I often find myself exploring the park with metaphorical retro-rainbow-colored glasses, seeing overlays of past memories in my modern frame of sight: I see a beaming World of Motion where Test Track now occupies. I imagine Dreamfinder and Figment strolling near their beloved glass pyramids at Journey Into Imagination. And, if I catch Spaceship Earth in the just the right sunlight, I can still see the promise of a place that set out to entertain, inform and inspire generations of people like myself thirty-five years ago. As someone who has always lived with one foot stuck in the past, the time-traveler in me is constantly trying to find ways to see the past in the present.

 

 

Although the technology for literal time-travel has not quite hit the market yet, I’ve discovered a way to traverse through time, thanks to a 35-year old Canon SLR camera, some 35mm film and a little imagination. To commemorate 35 years of my beloved park, I’m sharing a handful of my favorite photographs I’ve shot over the last three years that highlight Epcot’s everlasting magnificence in glorious 35mm film.

 

 

“We can visit worlds that were,

that could be,

and those of fantasy, and reality!”

– Journey into Imagination, EPCOT Center (1983 – 1998)

 

And when we’re makin’ memories
Happy days can reappear.