Looking At the Sky

About

Looking up at the sky has fascinated mankind since the dawn of time. The sun, moon and stars, as well as the various weather phenomena such as clouds, thunder, lightning and rainbows, have been subject to countless attributions and interpretations over the course of time. Celestial bodies and clouds were conceived of as the seat of good or evil powers, which were held responsible for earthly phenomena that were not yet understood. With the development of the sciences, the aim then became more and more to explore the heavens, to understand them, to control them, and finally to conquer them far into space.
Even though the sky was largely demystified in this way, clouds are still considered an interesting natural spectacle to this day. They are perceived as aesthetic phenomena, offering, similar to art, cause for diverse interpretations and affecting us in the most diverse of ways. In their changeability and indeterminacy, they have shown themselves since time immemorial to be processes rather than things and have thus become universal symbols of fleetingness and an eternal becoming and passing away, much more radically than the sea with its incessant pounding of waves and changing of tides.
Photography is better suited than any other form of art to capture the beauty of this fleeting ephemeral, and yet I am concerned with something else. My cloud photographs are more like „phantom images“ (Hervé Guibert), where what is actually interesting lies outside the field of view and cannot possibly be captured by photography. They are less representations of the clouds themselves than memories of the contemplative state of looking up at the sky. This is not about the personal sentimental gaze, but the attitude that Theodor W. Adorno described in his Minima Moralia as a utopian alternative to the expansive, progressive activism that has humanity „storming alien stars under a confused compulsion“: „Rien faire comme une bête, lying on the water and look peacefully into the heavens, being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment might step in place of process, doing, fulfilling ...“