Viewfinder

There is a faint glow permeating everything in the universe.^[1]This omnipresent first light—the primordial exposure, spawned from the Big Bang—continues to touch what we can see and the 95 percent of the world that we are not able to see. The first light is also a tired light; it loses its strength the more the universe expands and the farther things move apart.^[2]While someday the expansion of space will extinguish the first light, the world we live in retains this direct link back to light’s origins. When I recently asked my daughter Octavia, who was born at 12:10pm, March 6, 2016, in New York City, to pose in my studio by holding a small fragment of a meteorite steady enough for me to take a macroscopic picture of the juxtaposition, I thought about the luminescence from this faint glow that each of these bodies has absorbed throughout their differing scales of time, and how they are already linked. The inanimate triangular meteorite, about a quarter of an inch in width— finely textured, terrain-like, with silver metallic grains gleaming towards light—is a tiny fragment of a large stone that was observed to fall at 5:00pm, March 1, 2009, by two cattle herding villagers in northern Zimbabwe. While holding the speck in my studio on the inside tip of her right index finger, Octavia wondered out loud where in space this stone came from, and also why I was asking her to pose with it. We had been recently learning about the solar system. I told her I am in search of a view.

The primordial exposure is part of an interminable chain of events that led to the formation of galaxies and solar systems. Light in the form of photon particles from stars, such as our sun, are emitted remnants from the hydrogen fusion process that begins at the star’s core. Once the photons reach the surface of the star, they have cooled from high temperature gamma rays to become part of the visible wavelength, light that our biological eyes can see. When we gaze at faraway stars in the night sky, our eyes are the first objects in the photon particles’ paths that have intersected with their passage over great distances. We know that when we are glancing at stars, our bare eyes are making contact with light radiating from those stars’ younger states; we are, in a sense, looking back in time. The story of how the eye evolved is one that can be told in relation to the increasing distance we are able to see: first with the naked eye, then with the continually sophisticated ways we have been able to extend vision. Light emitted from the edges of the observable universe, 550 million light years from Earth, took nearly the same amount of time to arrive as the entire duration of our eye’s evolutionary path. If we picture two points: one that follows a physical course tracing the departure of photon particles from the outer edges of the observable universe, and the other marking the temporal arc starting with the very beginnings of biological sight, the exact center where these two points intersect is where our current eyes are touched by those particles.

In 2016, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered the very faint light of the star Icarus, the farthest light ever identified, 14 billion light years away. What the Hubble allowed us to see is light that originated long before the development of life on earth 3.1 billion years ago, and therefore before sight.^[1]A multi-cell animal such as a leech operates with the earliest stages of proto-vision and can detect only light and dark from a series of eyespots, concentrated areas on the body with a collection of light-sensitive cells. After about 35,000 generations, organisms with eyespots found it more advantageous to have a concave cup instead of a planar spot. It would take another 350,000 generations from an eyecup to a pin hole camera–like eye, like that found in a nautilus, with a narrow aperture that can not only detect light but discern depth and spatial relations. The expanse of time coupled with adaptive competition spurred exponential refinements to a wide array of designs that were built from this fundamental configuration. It’s only in the past century—.000001% of human evolution—that mechanical aids to vision have also developed. In 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope, a new, vastly more powerful telescope, was launched into space. The Webb surpasses the Hubble in sensitivity to the outer regions of the visible light spectrum. In order to see farther and closer to the very beginnings of the universe, the Webb will also be positioned much farther from Earth than its predecessor.^[2]The origins of the first light is almost within the field of view. 

The instinct to see, to view, beyond the means of survival, is distinctly part of consciousness. And beyond the compulsion to perceive, is the impulse to bring forth the ability to transform this gaze into a containable form. This, too, differentiates us from all other beings endowed with the faculty of sight. During the Tang Dynasty—an era in Chinese history when elites devoted more time to leisure than in the past, spurring advances in art, philosophy, and science—scholars sought out small-scale rock formations from nature, often from the depths of caves. Placed in the scholars’ studies, these stones represented a microcosm of the universe and became contemplative windows on existing and imaginary worlds.^[1]

Signs of these endeavors at mirroring nature have been found in paintings throughout Chinese history. In the nearly five-foot-wide ink-and-pigment scroll painting, The Nine Elders of the Mountain of Fragrance, produced during the Ming Dynasty around the mid-fifteenth century, it seems as though the painter, thought to be Xie Huan, was willfully directing the viewer’s gaze to focus on a scholar’s rock amid a sprawling pictorial background. The small stone, set on top of a table edged with a radiant red, was strategically situated among a wider constellation of similarly rosy elements that orbit around it. The scholar’s rock functions as a mise en abyme within the painting's expansive, sublime allure. Is it possible that this scene of nature contained within a tabletop display is connected to the human desire that later led to photography? From an oblique, elevated, and omnipotent vantage, the artist renders a garden scene, itself a vision of constructed nature. As part of this setting, the scholar’s rock becomes not only a link within the long progression of other pictorial processes that allow for the experience of seeing to be encompassed, but also a proto-photographic fragment that speaks to the human urge to give thought to what is observed in order to locate ourselves within the world.

In photographs of my grandfather’s childhood, signs of Taiwan’s colonial past are everywhere. One that has stayed acutely imprinted in my mind is a group portrait of my youthful grandfather and relatives taken in the 1920s. The men wear traditional yukatas and the children wear Japanese-style school uniforms worn. Their stiff countenance and stance are probably due to the prolonged exposure needed to make the picture. But what was striking were the unusually large leaves of a tree sprouting behind the assembled group. Its leaves were black and oily, each one disproportionately larger than the heads of the adults. If the tree had tentacles, it would be not unlike a type of carnivorous plant, engulfing the posing subjects standing within its grasp. Capturing the apparent incongruity of the elements in this photograph—my grandfather and relatives, the tropical climate of Taiwan, the Japanese clothing—was undoubtedly not the intention of the photographer, but the image stands as a compositional view of the contrasting forces shaping life in Taiwan at the time.

The act of seeing is never passive. The idea of the observer effect goes something like this: When one casts their gaze onto something, the observer changes or has influence over the future path of the subject or object’s being, however minutely. Seeing entangles the observer with the observed. Seeing requires the presence of light. So the mere presence of light and the observed object subjected to reflecting the light already causes a shift in its state on a subatomic level, since an electron changes course when it comes into contact with a photon. The photographic act is perhaps even more consequential to the subject depicted. There are countless numbers of examples supporting this proposition, from photography's role in influencing behavior, shifting public opinion, changing the course of conflicts, and shaping history.  In the photograph of my grandfather, did they decide themselves to dress in traditional Japanese clothing? Or did the photographer ask them to? It is common knowledge that the etymology of the word “photography” is rooted in Greek terms that translate to “drawing with light.” It is also accepted understanding that a photograph, although indexical, is more of a subjective transcription than an objective, evidentiary document. We can broaden this notion of photography’s role in shaping reality through other cultural understandings of the medium. In Japanese, “photography” is translated to 写真 which are the characters for “writing reality,” while in Chinese, the characters 攝影 mean “recording shadows.” A photographic observation is an intervention and changes the course of the subject’s future path. This photograph of my grandfather is part of his identity, putting the colonial forces shaping his life on display. And in turn, these forces, represented through this single photograph, have since been woven into the fabric of my worldview.

Photography allowed sight to be the first of the five senses that can be experienced through disembodied means. The first known photograph, taken in 1827 by Nicéphore Niépce, shows a pensive elevated vista through a window of a courtyard, some trees, and a distant field beyond. The silvery view on the heliographic pewter plate appears as if Niépce had the intuition of another person looking in his place. The image made way for a kind of viewing that forecasts the camera’s primary place among the set of tools used for endeavors of discovery. In the mid-nineteenth century, Carleton Watkins produced a set of majestic “mammoth plate” photographs of Yosemite Valley that would later influence the US Congress to pass legislation to protect the land. Much human and animal energy were needed to transform these views into a shareable form. In order to produce these images Watkins deployed a caravan of donkey-pulled carts that served as his mobile darkroom and carried the necessary equipment and chemicals for his journeys to prepare and process the cumbersome glass plate negatives.

In January, 2020, with camera and lighting equipment packed in two portable cases, I went to photograph an astronomical observatory situated on the remote eastern slope of the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico. Initially launched as a lodging observatory in the 1980s, where hobbyists, researchers, and scientists can stay to use onsite telescopes to conduct observational work, the observatory is now a site equipped with a vast assortment of networked telescopes that users from any location can access through online portals to operate. Lynn Rice, a spritely octogenarian, along with her partner, Mike, have been running the operation for nearly two decades. On the day I arrived, during a walk through the grounds, Lynn pointed to a large piece of petrified wood that she said dated from the Paleozoic period. She also picked up small pieces of pebble from the graveled path and pointed out that they were brachiopod fossils from the same era, about half a billion years ago. Branchiopods are known to have one of the earliest forms of eyespots, clusters of simple photoreceptor neurons that are genealogically linked to our complex eyes in the long course of evolution.

A waning theory of time describes the universe as a block, with all that has occurred in the past and all that will occur in the future already cast in its concretized vastness: imagine it as the penultimate dimensional photograph. Within this photographic mass, a cognitive individual meanders experientially in the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time. If the individual photographs this procession at every moment of their life, the stack of snapshots becomes a historical clock that can then be wound forward or backwards in order to view specific instances. Newtonian physics emphasizes the position and velocity of a particle. From these two attributes we can discern where the particle will be in the future as well as where it was in the past. If we replace velocity with time, then we have simply what all photographs are able to contain: indexes of positions in time and space. Imagine what now must be countless cognitive beings at any given moment taking a picture of what they see. That collection of moments, the multiplicity of stacks of snapshots, will indeed come to be the historical clock that is able to show what has collectively occurred in the past. It will also be a vast source of data from which it is possible to deduce the future course of all things.

Typically, an image sensor, or imaging sensor, is an electrical photosensitive grid that detects and transforms information into a visual picture. The sensor indexes variable wave information such as light or radiation as signals. The signals then trigger small bursts of currents that are in turn constructed into a visual map. Obsolescence is an inherent fate of all things technological. Since the prevalence of digital imaging sensors overtook analog film in camera technology, there have been constant adaptive shifts in improving the mechanisms of capture. However, the tradeoffs of one design to another requires a give-and-take between efficiency and accuracy. One of the significant recent changes is the predominance of Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS)–type sensors relative to Charged Coupled Device (CCD) sensors. The former consumes considerably less power, even if the latter produces higher fidelity images.^[1]While CMOS sensors are now commonplace in most camera devices, one of the main drawbacks is the quandary of the time lapse that the sequence of exposures must run from one pixel to another through the gridded format of the pixel array. Described as the “rolling shutter” effect, the CMOS sensor’s tracking of the three-dimensional geometry of the world is necessarily coupled with the fourth-dimensional passage of time. The process required to sense images from the universe must expend energy and time.

This axiom applies no matter the scale. The largest machine on earth, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), observes the behavior of the smallest entities in the universe. While on a week-long visit at CERN, in 2014, I ate meals in the center’s sprawling cafeteria, surrounded by physicists, engineers, technicians, researchers, and students. I was struck by the shared human energy and spirit that go into the range of research projects. Under construction for nearly 15 years, the LHC draws a third of the total energy supplied by the electrical system in Geneva during acceleration operations. The collider has a set of detectors along its 16-mile circumference that collect data from subatomic particle collision events. The amount of data generated necessitates as much storage as the city uses. When this data is collected, it is considered “machine readable,” and needs to be transformed into forms that are “human readable.” That is, into visual forms. The Atlas Detector, one of seven detectors along the LHC, comparable to a football field in scale, contains within its multiple layers of measuring instruments a hybrid pixel detector array made up of both CCD and CMOS-type sensors, taking advantage of each type’s unique attributes. During collision events, individual pixels in the giant array are triggered when struck by particles. From this geometrical, indexical, plotted set of points, complex visual mappings are then constructed to form depictive views, thus serving as evidence of the invisible occurrences. It was while having lunch in the cafeteria during one of the days of my visit that I had the realization that the people I was sitting with, who were part of the Atlas Detector team, are themselves image sensors. Their collective tasks entail creating these visualizations: transcribing information into images. They are also in search of views.

Perhaps because of its seclusion, its dramatic terrain, and the way it elicits in me the embodied sense of connection with landscape photographers of the past, I have returned to Point Reyes National Seashore in California a number of times in the past few years to photograph. Walking on the high cliffs along the water’s edge, wielding cumbersome camera gear, and feeling transformed not just by the sight of elevated vantage points of the sea, but also by the transfigured sense of assuming the persona of those photographers who have taken on similar journeys, I am looking for views. On these trips, I leave before dawn to be able to arrive at sunrise, though the usual foggy conditions of Northern California mean that I often have to wait for the haze to clear so that the rising sunlight above the western horizon can skim over the expanse of the ocean surface unimpeded. While I wait, I often trek around, climbing the hills and rocks, stopping when the views were especially arresting, usually by myself, as it is rare to see anyone out there. Extrapolating the notion of waiting a few hours for the right picture-taking conditions from the scale of a day to the cosmological scale, I think about the waiting period from the absolute start of the initial expansion of the universe to the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago, when early humans emerged from caves. This was a period of some 13.77 billion years during which the atmospheric conditions precluded seeing and while the biological capacity for complex perception was still evolving. Once the terrestrial climate was warm enough, what was it like for early humans to come out of their cave shelters and be able to see, for the first time, the mountains, plains, rivers, and the seas? What was it like for them to be able to finally face nature? In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from 8 AD, the development of human cognition is intertwined with the vast transformation of the universe from the dark, unformed morass of chaos to the illuminated, life-supporting environment of a biosphere.

He gave to Man a stately look replete with majesty
And willed him to behold the Heaven with count'nance cast on high, 
To mark and understand what things are in the starry sky.

Sometimes as I wait for the light to change at Point Reyes, visions of this evolutionary trajectory spring to mind. I imagine that the first people, perhaps out foraging for food in the early morning, turning up towards the sky, noticing first the warm touch of light on their faces, then seeing the view framed beneath by the distant mountains, the enveloping sunlight giving it a dazzling otherworldly glow; at that moment the being instinctually stopping in their path for no other reason than to contemplate the grandeur they are beholding. The being is, as Ovid describes in his epic poem, the face that turns and looks upon itself. It is a moment when nature is embodied in the perceiver, facing nature itself, in recognition of what is being perceived.

The seemingly banal gesture of clicking a shutter (or tapping the virtual button in your smartphone app) is a small step in the long chain of transformations that must necessarily take place to produce an image. The long chain begins with energy in the form of gamma rays released as the byproduct of nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium at the Sun’s inner core takes 30,000 years to make its way to its surface layer. The process of absorption through each successive solar layer stretches out the wavelengths of this radiation. It is then re-emitted in weaker forms along the electromagnetic spectrum, first as X-rays, then ultraviolets. The remnants of this intense energy eventually emerge as visible light from the plasma surface layer, spreading out radially like ripples in a pond, reaching Earth in 8.3 minutes on its outward path. Energy coupled with time is an essential combination for light to make contact with biological eyes. To arrest light in the form of a photograph, the energy-time symbiosis that carries light to the point of sight requires significant additional energy and time through resource extraction and human labor. If we consider these transformations within the rules of the first law of thermodynamics, which states that the total amount of energy that has ever existed in a closed system has always remained the same, then each step in the process of image production is a conversion of potential energy into a photographic form.

In the late 1930s, Kodak used some five tons of silver in one week alone, delivered in forty-pound bouillon bars that were sourced from Mexican mines then refined.^[1]At Kodak Park West, in Rochester, New York, the silver bars were dissolved in large vats of nitric acid, then purified, crystalized, and fused with gelatin—a processed protein derived from the byproducts of meat production. In this extremely brief description of the production of analog photographic film, it is already evident that substantial amount of energy was required. From caloric energy expended by the miners to fossil fuel energy for transport to chemical energy used in the processing, we can surmise that virtually all six basic forms of energy—chemical, electrical, radiant, mechanical, thermal, and nuclear—are necessary elements that make possible the human impulse to record real and imagined worlds. Thus, the simple click of the shutter is rather something much more complex; it is the strange median between at one end the path of energetic solar light and the other the final stage in an extended chain of energy transformations.