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Same Sun, Different Sky: The collaborative follow up to ‘Sonder’.
A project to capture six months in a single image. I invited friends to do the same from across the globe and, combined, we aimed to capture a year as the Earth turned around the Sun. The result is – Same Sun, Different Sky.
My pinhole camera looked out over the field opposite our house, bordered by a row of trees. The view of those trees has kept me company over the years and been the inspiration for many pieces of my artwork and poetry. We fixed the pinhole camera to an upstairs window on Midsummer’s day. It captured the trees going from being in full leaf to the stark lines of winter. The pinhole camera weathered storms and snow and I was pleased to get an image at the end, it’s by no means guaranteed!
We celebrated birthdays and lived our lives. We sunned ourselves in the garden and sat out into the warm late evenings, watching the children play up and down the path. We went away on holidays and came back as the seasons changed. And on until the darkness pushed us to draw the curtains by mid afternoon. And all the while, the pinhole remained, recording the unfolding image in front of it. We took it down on the shortest day, the Winter Solstice, and it offered up a picture, a record of that time, containing so much and slowing it down, catching the sun’s traces as it lowered towards the horizon.
Several thousand miles away in Australia Sophie was sensible and put up four pinhole cameras. As we were at the height of summer she was in midwinter.
She explains, “3 were at church including the good one, 1 was on our balcony where I fear it was simply cooked! The last 6 months saw all 5 of us have a birthday, R learnt to swim and A joined the school choir. The camera was up during almost all of the whale migration season (starts at the beginning of June) which was the most utterly, mystifyingly wondrous of happenings! The camera looked down towards the main street of Coogee and saw countless hours of sunshine, but also its fair share of torrential rain and phenomenal lighting.”
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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!”
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!”
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:
“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!”
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.”
Six months, six pinehole cameras, three countries: Same Sun, Different Sky.
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