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.