I was pleased that over in Spain, Matthew agreed to take part in the project too.  He fixed his pinhole camera to a small balcony and hoped for the best.   

The pinhole camera looked out over “a large internal courtyard in Nou Barris, a district of Barcelona.  We’ve had months of brilliant sunshine, some grey days, and more than a few torrential storms! The balcony has also seen its fair share of political unrest over the last few months: it’s a pity the solargraphs can’t record audio, because for about a month after the disrupted referendum of 1 October, each night at 10pm dozens of residents gathered on their respective balconies to perform a “caçerolada”, which basically consists of banging a metal pot with a spoon and generally making as much of a ruckus as possible!”

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Matthew and I got to discussing ‘The Long Now’.  “The “long now” is something that resonates in many different aspects of life, I think. I too love the idea that everything we do has an impact and is somehow imprinted, whether physically, metaphorically or even spiritually. I have a Marxist friend who once explained to me how a product is not only its physical essence, but also a vessel for the hours of work that someone put into making it (and in turn the hours of training and practice that served to produce that worker’s professional skills). Weirdly enough, it’s also a concept I’ve found in horror novels and films, with the idea of memories imprinting themselves onto a particular place, which gives rise to the idea of ghosts, hauntings, etc. There’s also the idea of the human race as a continuum, a single entity experiencing itself subjectively; or on a more prosaic level, the idea of continuity within families with children as a continuation of their parents, both genetically and as a result of their upbringing. And I guess that, overarching all of this, science tells us that all of the atoms that have ever existed or will ever exist are already present in the universe, and therefore nothing is ever truly lost, only transformed from one state into another. I find that to be a strangely comforting notion!”

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We played about with the original solargraph images, changing the colours and intensity.  There were so many stories to be read into each image.  Pure poetry:

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“like an enormous sandbank rising up over the white-hot city!”

“they make the sun’s path look like a sea creature: a dolphin maybe, or a humpbacked whale. A giant cetacean leaping across the sky…”

“It’s amazing how each version of the image has its own unique identity! The turquoise and blue one looks like a pair of lips, while the spherified ones look like a superhero symbol and a glacial light-well, respectively!”

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Matthew unearthed an old photo editing tool and “was amazed to see how some of the detail of the building came out, because that couldn’t even be seen in the original solargraph! Amazing how a photograph can record that hidden information and then have those details teased out of it with a bit of patience.”

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Six months, six pinehole cameras, three countries: Same Sun, Different Sky.

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