Colors of Time - Stefan Vanthuyne (Moving Mountains)
The air is part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and its soil. It has its own air; and it is to the quality of its air that is due the endless diversity of its colourings.
―Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (1977)
[I]f the Sun’s Light consisted of but one sort of rays, there would be but one Colour in the whole World.
―Isaac Newton, Opticks (1704)
Does light experience time? The simple answer, according to the internet (and to science), is no, light does not experience time; from the perspective of a photon, the smallest particle of light, there is no such thing as the passing of time. In fact, it doesn’t experience distance or space either. It is one of those little facts, never considered but nonetheless surprising, that are hard to grasp for us humans. It is something that transcends us all; as an idea, it becomes something abstract and out of reach, as it goes far beyond our own worldly experience.
A similarly overwhelming sense of smallness, of sheer human insignificance, can be felt when we talk about “deep time,” the term coined by American author John McPhee in 1981, but described about 200 years earlier, in 1788, by James Hutton. The Scottish geologist proposed that the Earth’s landforms could be explained by geological processes. Land surfaces were constantly being worn down by erosion and deposited as sediments in seas and oceans, while new land was being formed through volcanism and other heat-generated processes from inside the Earth. According to Hutton, these processes were cyclical and must have repeated many times throughout our planet’s history. Therefore, the Earth must have been a lot older than the 6,000 years people assumed at the time; instead, it must be of an inconceivably old age.
“Deep time,” or geological time, refers to the approximately 4.54 billion years that our planet has been around—this is the age scientists tend to agree on. Though we can measure, explain, and rationalize deep time, it is impossible to fully get our minds around it; we will never physically experience such evolutions, such immense stretches of time. We measure time in terms of years, decades, and centuries, even in millenniums, but never in billions of years. The slowness in which the world took and keeps taking shape, then, becomes almost unbearable when considering our own existence.
Perhaps this is why nature has divided time into cycles—not the geological cycles as described by Hutton, but the smaller cycles we do experience: the cycles of the seasons, the cycle of a day. History might be linear (though is it really?), time is cyclical; twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, and so on. Cycles provide comfort, make things—make our lives—manageable, tolerable, comprehensible, a little more evident. With every night that falls, a new dawn and another day is just around the corner; the metaphors about the sun rising and the coming of new light are myriad and well-known.
The Earth is round; it revolves around the sun, and around its own axis at a certain speed—this is what makes up the years and the days. Daylight, then, the light emitted by the sun, becomes the way for us to measure time in this cyclical manner. It appears, brightens, reaches its peak strength, fades, and ultimately disappears (though in northern hemispheres not always) into the darkness of the night. Depending on the position of the sun, depending on the time of day and on the season, depending on where exactly we find ourselves on the planet, daylight gives a different view of whatever we lay our eyes on.
This, in fact, was the premise of Bastiaan van Aarle’s previous book, 01:20, which consists of thirty-one images made in an Icelandic village during the whole month of July, one image per day. Because of the village’s northern location, on the first of July the sun doesn’t set; it only briefly touches the horizon and then rises again. During the course of the month, it sinks a little deeper every day, until night slowly but surely returns to the village. Each image is made at precisely 01:20 a.m.; in each image, at this exact same time, the light is slightly different, until darkness begins to take over again.
If in 01:20 time was very specific and the images extremely punctual, then in Moving Mountainstime becomes somewhat relative. Here, it is not the peculiar passing of a day that never really turns into night that is of interest to Van Aarle. Instead, it is the movement of the seemingly immovable planet that is the subject of the work—a movement that we don’t experience ourselves, the Earth itself being our reference point for stillness, but are only made aware of through the trajectory of the sun and the changing of the light.
It seems like an extraordinary idea, then, to make photographs—still images—of mountains, solid landforms that are so connected to deep time that they have become a grand and awe-inspiring symbol of it, to demonstrate how indeed the Earth is far from still. Even more curious is the unusual use of color. But otherworldly as the resulting images may seem, they too have a link to science. Moreover, there is a wonderful connection—an homage to, one could even say—with the history of color photography.
In terms of light and science, color photography finds some of its origin in Isaac Newton’s prism experiments from the 1660s, through which he discovered that daylight, or white light, breaks into a rainbow of colors. Each of these different colors
—Newton noted seven—has a different wavelength; and the way we see something in color when light is reflected off an object, is the result of some wavelengths being reflected, while others are absorbed. Photography, an intrinsically technical process, deals with both; with light passing through an optical lens and with light being reflected or absorbed.
One might wonder what was in the water in Scotland during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as it was another Scottish scientist, the young mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, to whom the first color photograph is contributed. Maxwell had a tartan ribbon photographed by Englishman Thomas Sutton, who in his turn had created the first single lens reflex camera. Maxwell had Sutton photograph the ribbon through three separate black-and-white magic lantern slides, each one with a different color filter: a red, a green, and a blue one. Once developed, they were projected through separate magic lanterns, using the same color filters, to create a single image. This image was first presented in 1861, during a lecture Maxwell gave on color theory at the Royal Institution in London. It showed how red, green, and blue were the primary colors, deriving from light, from which any desired hue could be obtained when combined in the right mixture.
To create each one of the images in Moving Mountains, Van Aarle shot four black-and-white photographs, all within the same frame but spread over a certain period of time, in which the light had changed as the day progressed—herein lies the main difference with Maxwell, who made sure the ribbon was photographed three times under the exact same conditions. Then Van Aarle transferred one photograph to cyan, one to magenta, one to yellow, and one to black. When brought together again to form one image, it is the difference in moment and in light—the shift in rotation of the planet—in each of the four static frames that causes these colored tinges.
Their effect is so strange that it feels as if the trees, the leaves, and the rocks exist in a different dimension. It is as if the soft hues come fuming from the deepest soil of the mountains and the woods, from their deepest history and deepest time, floating gently in the thinnest and stillest of mountain air. They become subtle traces of the passing of time, as Van Aarle would have experienced it while being there with his camera.
The images, then, are miraculous, because Van Aarle never knows in advance what they will look like—despite all technical parameters he cannot conceive them beforehand. What is revealed here is only revealed in the image and can only be seen in the image. This, then, is the magic of photography, which is still as much about human experience as it is about science—about revealing something about the world and our relation to it, our position in it, our perception of it.
The landscape changes steadily. I walk between houses and then through woods. Gradually, the trees creep away, and the landscape breaks open. I get wide views and at the same time I see the hike ahead. The route becomes more erratic, more stones, moss, and here and there birds, mammals, and lizards. I have to be careful where I put my feet, the mountain is not as stable as it looks from afar. Gravel crunches underneath. A small rock slides away and starts a tiny avalanche. The bright sun burns. The camera, tripod, food, and drinks in my backpack start to weigh down. My back is soaked. No shade to hide in. Suddenly, I see an image. I have to think carefully if it’s worth it because it could take a few hours before I can continue. Will I have enough time to go to the next cabin or turn back? I take out my tripod and make my frame. The image looks good, but no idea if the result will be the same. The colors of time are invisible.
A second splendor of the mountain begins. The camera is installed and does its thing. I can sit and watch. I take in the mountain. Each image takes time and I take this time to become one with the place. I feel the wind on my skin, see the alpine crows fly, the clouds slide slowly across the landscape. I begin to think about my small self in this greater whole, about how long this earth has been here. How often the clouds have rushed past the mountains. The cycles of water that form glaciers and take pieces of the mountain with them. Peace and quiet. Sometimes I am lucky and there is a small grassy hill. Then I cannot resist taking a nap. I lie down among the flowers and see the wide landscape through them. It recharges me and I understand again why I photograph.
(Moving Mountains)
Dating the Light - Bob Vanden Broeck (01:20)
Whoever searches Wikipedia for “Ólafsfjörður” will learn that this place is a small town with 800 inhabitants. Fresh- and saltwater fish swim here. There is a natural history museum where, besides a stuffed seal and many stuffed birds, there is also a stuffed polar bear. It has a certain sadness to it. A country that is mainly praised, in an almost clichéd manner, in travel guides because of its unspoiled nature, seems to be reduced in this village to some static objects in display cases. 01:20 balances between this romance of the place and its sad beauty.
Although no attention is paid to this actual museum in 01:20, it is the same sad poetry that makes these images so striking. Bastiaan van Aarle doesn’t necessarily mean to deny the romantic cliché. There are panoramic views showing tall mountains, grassy slopes in which lovers would love to nestle. Besides this, van Aarle has a precise eye for detail, which is typical of all of his projects.
A dead-end street ending in a large sandy roundabout. The tire tracks are still clearly visible. There is a certain aggression in these circles. The circle as endless movement, repeating itself, as infinite as the misty horizon that feeds the poetry of these traces in the distance. In addition, there are many cars. These vehicles indicate a certain dependence. Do most people work outside of this town? Are most basic services found elsewhere?
There are many dilapidated containers. Rusted industry, an abandoned farm. A church tower pierces in between. The romantic landscape not only evokes a form of escapism, it is at the same time a backdrop for man, who is quietly suppressed by the mountains. This town is running empty. Desolation, disrepair. A photo shows a small blue wall that fell into ruin. This fencing mainly serves to mark a specific territory, to claim it. As if the natural environment no longer forms a passive backdrop on which humans act, this backdrop acts in itself, reclaiming its place. You would, however, sell these images short by reading them as a desolate rendering of Ólafsfjörður. They also contain a lot of admiration for this place and its inhabitants. This project is more about poetry than about critique.
In one picture, two ladders lay on the roof of a house, as if the residents want to escape the oppressive corridor between the two houses in the foreground and want to climb to the clouds. Here the roof becomes a metaphor for a refuge. Everything here indicates an impending departure. The houses seem so fragile, ready to be flooded by the next avalanche. The village almost looks like a scale model, as if the houses were fabricated out of cardboard and glued to the landscape. The last image shows a mountain that turns to the camera authoritatively, like a general. It is not man, but the mountain rules over this landscape.
Van Aarle doesn’t only use a narrative view; this project is also meta-photographical. Every day—and this for thirty-one days—he went out to photograph at 01:20 a.m., the darkest moment of the day. It must have been almost meditative, the careful search for the right place from where he wished to frame this specific moment in time. Where our eyes normally adjust to the light, the photographer has the power to capture these shifts in light in clearly defined images. Slowly, page-by-page, the light slides out of the image. It is perhaps an ode to photography. This medium is dependent on light and owes its existence to it. Capturing these shifts in light at the same hour invariably would almost be like a rendezvous between the photographer, the device, and the light that brings them together to their common denominator: photography.
As slowly as the light slips out of the picture, the village slips away into the surface of the image, until it seems almost as unreachable as the top of a bulky mountain. It almost seems as if van Aarle wants to tell us that not only the animals are mounted here. It is the strength of the artist to unite two conflicting elements such as beauty and sadness in a single image. That is poetry and that is what makes Ólafsfjörður a fascinating place. Here you can cry on the same day for a panoramic view as for the hopeless future that rests here in the landscape like a rusty shed.
I like to let my imagination run free when wandering around. I wonder what happens behind fences, tall hedges and closed doors. How do people live their lives? What do they create to do so? And will it survive the test of time? The tree might outgrow the house. The forest felled for project development. I don’t know, but I make it up while I go.
This imagination is fed by my environment. I read about a sealevel rise of 65 meters and I’m intrigued. For this to happen, all the ice around the world must melt. Belgium would become a surreal collection of islands. I suddenly see beach houses, tree tops popping out of the sea or flooded industrial plants.
Photography might not be able to capture what I imagine, but I can still visually suggest it. A subtle line invades the image and transports you to another world. A world which isn’t visible, but might become a reality.
(Waterlijn)
Bastiaan van Aarle in conversation with Bob Vanden Broeck (Interactions)
Concerning the work of Bastiaan van Aarle, I am not the distant viewer who asks questions based on a productive ignorance. This interview already happened before I even took it. Bastiaan and I love to meet in bars in Antwerp, where we often speak about ‘Interactions’. That’s why we thought that a retrospective of our talks would be the ideal introduction to this book. How to start an interview that already happened?
Bob Vanden Broeck (BB): Good question. I should maybe start from the beginning. Why for god’s sake did you decide to go to Newport?
Bastiaan van Aarle (BA): The U.K. fascinated me for a long time, mainly because of the untainted nature. This is something we don’t have in Belgium anymore. I love the idea of being able to disappear in nature. As a child I often went cycling in the woods and always took my camera with me. That is how I captured the places I visited. This way of thinking has never really changed. When I heard that Newport had one of the best courses in documentary photography, the decision was easily made. The University of South Wales would give me the chance to discover this nature.
BB: I believe that your romantic way of thinking changed rapidly after you arrived in Newport?
BA: I immediately went to a student welcome to meet new people. When they took me to different places in Newport, there was only one word that came to mind: horrible. There was absolutely nothing beautiful; everything was rundown. But I also started to think how this was possible, why did Newport look so horrible? What has happened here? Did we, or I, have a romantic idea of Wales? This is actually where the project started. I knew immediately that I would be able to take interesting images of the interaction between society and nature. In a way I also saw the beauty in this decay.
BB: And this mining industry was some kind of catalyst?
BA: That’s right. Around the mines you see that nature is looted by this industry. And when this industry falls apart, we feel even poorer than before. I wanted to know what the influences of industry were from the past until the last day I stayed there. That’s why I took a lot of pictures of suburbs. I wanted to know how people live there now, without the industry that somehow connected them. For instance the picture of the bowling field (p5). You have the emptiness on the foreground and the houses of the upper class behind it. Everything is delimited by fences, sometimes even with barbed wire. The absurdity of this post-industrial reality is also clearly visible in the picture on page two. This picture suggests an important building, an epicentre of the city. But it’s actually empty and nothing happens there. But when you look closely at the details, you’ll see how absurd this place is.
BB: Yes, that image is full of absurd details. A car that is stuck between a fence and concrete blocks and behind it in capital letters ‘NO ENTRY’. However, I still have the feeling that some images are a very romantic construction. We see a lonesome person sitting in a landscape, with his back facing us, a misty mountain … how do these images relate to the other ones in the book? Does this romantic image of Wales add up in the end?
BA: These images were added later. In the beginning the Taff-trail was paramount. But the longer I stayed and photographed places around this route, the more I realised how important this Taff-trail still is. Gradually, the Taff-trail lost its purpose as a defying and guiding element. Once I discarded this route as an absolute foundation, I started seeing these beautiful landscapes. However, you will never see these untainted landscapes like when you type Wales in google. This untaintedness is actually a photographic illusion.
BB: You could say that nature got a grip on you again. You can also see this impact in other images where nature takes over again. A statement?
BA: No, totally not. I absolutely don’t want to teach life lessons with my images, nor will I moralise. For example I don’t expect that people who saw this exhibition will turn their heater a few degrees lower during winter. I only record the interaction between man and nature. I recently read somewhere that mankind is a natural disaster in itself. This idea fascinates me. But in Wales I also noticed that nature recovers after a while. Take the image of the bridge which is overgrown by plants. This used to be a really important place for the locals. Now people are still allowed, but only on a small trail. Fantastic isn’t it?
BB: Is this for you the beauty of these interactions?
BA: For me human influences can be very esthetical. I think scars in landscapes can be very beautiful. And these scars are sometimes caused by nature itself. Often it’s about the details in an environment where the exceptional interactions are visible. I do it for those details. That’s what it’s all about.
BB: I can see that. Sometimes nothing seems to happen in the images at first glance. For example the image of the church. I saw a church, a graveyard and a tree. I actually didn’t get further than a cheap symbolic tension. But there is also a lot of poetry in that image. You could say that the church itself is sealed.
BA: Indeed. If you look longer at the image, than you’ll notice that the windows are sealed. The church is as dead to me as the graveyard itself. It has totally lost its function. It’s also here that the details guide the interaction. And the book is connected by these details.
BB: When we look at the history of landscape photography, we see a clear line of demarcation between photographers who romanticize a certain landscape, like for instance Ansel Adams did. On the other hand there are photographers who want to document landscapes in a more objective manner. In your work I see both approaches of photography. Thus, a game between expectations and the unexpected is created in the book.
BA: I capture. Either when you document or romanticize, a photographer always frames the reality with the choice of point of view from where he photographs. I am conscious of how other photographers turned themselves towards landscapes. I love Ansel Adams as much as Robert Adams. I also think that John Davies had a big influence on this project. They all had a bigger or smaller influence on this project. But I do believe that you are right. My expectations often clashed with reality. This book is also an interaction between the landscape and me.
BB: Some of the images in the exhibition aren’t in the book. It seems that both ways of representation are clearly different for you.
BA: Absolutely. The book is a finished project. I started from the book and not from the exhibition. The book tells a specific story. The exhibition tells the same story in a different way. That’s why there are images at the exhibition, which aren’t in the book. There is a different kind of dialogue between images in a space. Images that are placed next or across each other will be easily connected. This would be confusing for the story in the book. It wouldn’t even make sense.
BB: What do you expect of this exhibition?
BA: It would be arrogant – and also a lack of realism – if I would think that the exhibition would have a giant impact. For me it’s mainly important that this project is finished. I totally stand behind the result. The meaning of it is now in the hands of the viewer.
Existence - Alexander Norton (Un-titled)
Artificial lights surround an artificial structure. The key component being man made, for man’s use, these places are not there by accident. Without our cars and trucks convenient places to fill up our petrol or gas would not need to exist, and their existence would not need to be known. The beaming light from a petrol station advertisement board, unnamed, you could say Un-titled. Without our own existence we do not need to advertise, anything. Our needs and existence require us to spend our money, invest our time and produce and consume products. These help us remain our existence. The key component is exists.
Much like the time we have spent on the earth, the photographs tend to collect time until it becomes too much to bear. The meaning itself remains to exist, and we are left with a blank slate. Here, the billboard takes a different shape and intention – its technology out runs its communication. There is nothing to see at all.
Without this signage company property becomes nameless, free from branding and identity. We know nothing of what they produce and therefore cannot consume it. In Bastiaan’s world the sites just exist without presence, without commanding their claim on the land. The sites could be empty, to let. They could be meaningless, as they offer nothing for us to read, to consume. The consumption is the primary target of these sites, and the business this invites becomes its aim, it justifies its existence. The structure of the advertising space and branding is restricted to a box of luminous light projecting the logo, message and aim. Their light so piercing it scorches the edges when they no longer display anything, never aloud to escape the confines of the frame, never allowed to leave.
The disposable nature of the ideas placed in these led squares and rectangles move and change depending on who is funding their life. When they are left entirely alone, when business dries up, they take on a lonely way of life. For it is us that created them and we can neglect them and leave them to rust, to crumble, to ultimately fall. It is down to the transient nature of someone renting them out, draining their resources and moving on when people do not pass there anymore. Their smiles are always glistening, inviting and seducing travellers, regulars and outsiders to visit the building behind. They are deceitful and do not care for ethics. This is because they are have no consciousness, they do not breathe, they do not consider what’s on show, they have no ethics because we created them for our use to spot our consumption from the side of the road. They will agree with anybody and anything, revolving at times with contradicting messages, views and general outlook. We made them to be used.
Now, looking at these sites without a name raises a question of their structure. Without bold slogans slapped across our cheeks they are non impressionable. They merely pass us by. Without content they are just structures waiting for a name, waiting to serve our needs.
The anonymity, as a result, leaves us studying the architecture instead. The structure comes to focus and other details detract from our view. We get a chance to see what we were never able to notice. The bold, blank and perfect rectangles, narrow or wide, present absolutely nothing. Whether or not we consider the content is all down to the individual. This leaves each reading, each view of the series, Un-titled, completely unique. For one it raises questions that another might not fathom. What ultimately says nothing, says everything about us. About our need to consume, be notified of new things to consume and how we get on in daily life - how we equip ourselves for survival.
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