In 1863, the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) commissioned prominent balloonist Eugène Godard to construct a 196-foot high balloon, which he called Le Géant. Nadar took Le Géant all over Europe, hovering above countless cities to pioneer the first instances of aerial photography. In a now-famous caricature, ‘Nadar elevating Photography to Art’, Honoré de Daumier pictures a wiry Nadar tensely perched in the basket of his balloon as it tilts precariously in the wind. His top hat has been lost to the air and hovers mid-escape above his attentively hunched body. Beneath him, across the top of every building below — Sacré Coeur just visible in the distance — is written PHOTOGRAPHIE.

Following its second launch, Le Géant ultimately crashed in Hanover, leaving Nadar with a fractured leg. The photographer deemed the balloon, made of 20,000 metres of silk, unsuitably light, and — with Jules Verne — founded ‘The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines’. But for a brief moment, Nadar was airborne — in flight — above it all — peering down at the world through the eye of his black box camera, a wet-plate Cyclops.

What would it have looked like, the giant, Le Géant, the enormous, silk balloon? Would the fabric have churned and eddied in the breeze? Would the basket have whipped wildly from side-to-side? Or would all have been calm and peaceful — soft ripples — a pause, a caesura — up there, so high above the earth. A sigh, an exhalation, a suspension, stationary, a station.

It’s true, in any case, that the air can sometimes feel very heavy. Or dense, should I say. The air is dense; we seek heavier means of navigation. The light is full of shadows; we devise more precise means of preservation.

In comparison with the long history of astronomy, that of photography is incredibly brief — blink and you could miss it. And yet the two share a great deal, in both technical detail and thematic concerns. Perhaps the eyepiece of the former long-lens telescoped into the viewfinder of the latter — a smooth orbit. Looking in, looking out: the observatory, the camera obscura.

Enter the darkened room, approach the aperture, the eye, and dare to gaze at what it beholds. Wait long enough, let the light sink in — seconds, minutes, hours, days — light — years — until the image is transfixed, solidifies, becomes an object, a meaningful reflection.

An aperture is a space, an opening, a gap in something otherwise solid. Through the aperture, through a glass darkly — pinhole camera — we are able to circumscribe, to scrutinize, to magnify. But an aperture is also a hole, as in a puncture — that which pierces. Aperture is synonymous with eye. And indeed, we know vision to be a tentative, tenuous thing — a hole that is not a hole — the eye is capable of sight and blindness in equal measure.

Station V. A hole that is not a hole. The moon passes in front of the sun. It appears as a black disc encircled by a halo of light, like smoke, solar flares licking at the darkened surrounding sky. Dangerous to behold, for the light — though ostensibly veiled — continues to radiate: it will transfix, burn the retina: the unholy vision destroys vision.

Until a short while ago, I was — in fact — under the impression that an eclipse was a kind of supernatural event. When I was ten years old, there was a total eclipse visible in Ontario, 10 May 1994. Tuesday, a school day. At my school, all of the students were forced to remain in the gymnasium-cum-cafeteria for the duration of the eclipse. We sat silently, the windows entirely blocked off by large sheets of thick cardboard: to protect us, they said. This event, in conjunction with a 1980s Disney film called Watcher in the Woods, in which the event of a solar eclipse brings to terrifying fruition a decades old mystery of death and paranormal occurrences, produced in me the notion that if you were exposed to a solar eclipse — if you were literally anywhere the sun could see you, whether you were looking at it or not — its rays would seek your eyes and bore into them: you would be immediately struck blind.

I have since been disabused of the notion, but in another sense, in another medium, the question endures: how to trap the light — how to hold it — carefully — and at just the right angle. Don’t burn the plate, the image will be bleached white, exposed beyond recognition, erased, blinded. Heliography, used to describe the earliest photographic process, comes from helios, sun + graphein, to write. Press too hard and you’ll tear the paper.

Like the sun, the moon has similarly been associated with looking, or the eye. Think of the famous scene in Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou: a night sky with a full moon, long trails of cloud moving quickly — one cleanly bisects the glowing white orb. Cut to a woman with her eye being peeled open by a man whose hand holds a straight razor — as she stares directly into the camera, the blade moves towards her face in a neat horizontal line. Decades earlier, George Meliès’ A Trip to the Moon features a moon with an incredibly animated human face — heavily textured, high ridges, deep craters. When the expedition finally launches, it rockets directly into the moon’s eye and remains lodged tightly within its socket. The moon, bless him, seems strangely nonplussed.

The sun, the moon, stars, nebulae, galaxies — all have been referred to as ‘eyes’, by layperson and scientist alike. It would be easy to speculate that the comparisons, similes, metaphors — when the moon hits your eye, etc. — are due to visual similarity alone. But there is something else: a kind of scopophilia. Things we look at, incline our heads, gaze, peer. Things that look back at us; things that are always watching — permanent fixtures, glittering in the firmament.

And why wouldn’t it? At Station V, there are ropes holding the moon in place. They were there too, the ropes, at the other station, with its distant mountain ranges and its wide, white sky. I ignored them, dreaming instead of movement and flight. They were faint enough — their fastening holes slight, barely visible around the circumference, and easy to overlook. But here, the moon is undeniably fixed in place, pinned to the page — tethered to a frame somewhere just outside of the frame.

And why not? Photographers have long desired it so. Like astronomers, they trained their sights on the moon — fixed through lenses — imprinted on silver-plate, wet-plate, paper ­— stereoscope, heliograph, photogravure, astrophoto.

Station IV and the stars are out in full force. Beneath them, a rocky planetary ground glitters in the half-light. In the lower-right quadrant of the sky is a radiant cluster where the light is snagged, caught — held, preserved: a handful of gems against the obsidian sky, winking, precious. Is it the Crux? Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon cruces — the Southern Cross, cross-hairs, the brightest stars in the Milky Way, easily visible from the southern hemisphere at any time of year? Carro dell’ostro, the ancient navigators called it, ‘southern chariot’: follow it, follow it anywhere and everywhere. The brightest point is Alpha Crucis — blue-tinged, a triple star. Reach out and place your right hand against the sky, make a fist, clench your hand tightly and align the first knuckle with the axis of the cross. Follow the tip of your thumb to find south.

Stars like images, images like stars: we study them as guides, as truths — means of navigation, alignment, orientation. We try to read them for what they might reveal about the past, present, future. We chart points of meaning and hold the papers in our hands, tightly; the corners and edges become worn with use.

But light, or should I say illumination, always betrays itself. Blinking past the stars, peering closely into the darkness and I can see a faint circle, a careful incision of light that circumscribes this portion of the glittering firmament. And beyond it, the surrounding blackness has a different, deeper, starless quality. I have been mistaken, dazzled by the constellations. I see now that it is a discus, a saucer, a belt, a ring, a record of stars — not lodged, but suspended within the night sky: a hook and chain above, a tripod below hold it in place. This piece of sky is flat and solid, pierced with stars that act as vehicles for another source of light, unseen from where I stand shrouded in an invisible projected focus hood.

How easy it is to forget that, like meaning, photographs are not taken, but made. To look, to observe, to behold one’s station is to be suspended: a suspension — of — time — space — disbelief. To see is not to believe. Or should I say to not believe. Think of the Apollo lunar photographs, contested to this day. The shadows don’t fit! Too long, conflicting light sources! We couldn’t see the stars! What a great deal we want from the things we perhaps don’t quite understand

These balloons, eclipses, constellations — blind, haloed, and punctured with light — keep us on the ground, dreaming of what we cannot reach. They remind, aides-mémoires, they whisper: you, me, I, we are the stations. Any thing, they say, every thing may be eclipsed and overshadowed, if for a moment only. We thereby know its properties, magnitude in lack, and then in restoration. In the ability of things to come full circle: light — darkness — vision. The casual sublimity of the orb, the exquisite tyranny of the eclipse: no beginning or end, all beginnings and ends, in the same, breathtaking trajectory.

On the far side of the moon there is a crater called Niepce, named after Joseph Niécephore Niépce, inventor of heliography and the oldest surviving photograph. It is a worn crater formation, ‘with rim features that have been softened and rounded by subsequent deposits of ejecta’. It is a careful, patient activity, to observe the features of the moon: one must follow the border of the sun’s illumination, the thin region between darkness and light where the shadows are longest — the shadow terminator, this place is called. In Niepce, it has been observed, there is a small crater shaped like a teardrop, likely created by a low-angle impact.

Tell me again, I ask the stations — tell me again how nothing is as it seems. Show me how fine a thing it is to spend one’s time securing moments of illumination for safe-keeping. Convince me — I want to believe — that every twinkling trace, every glance of light is an inscription, a burnishing, a tiny percussion in the surface of time: a still life, memento mori, to its passage. Take me there.

 – Emily LaBarge

Emily LaBarge is a writer based in London, where she teaches at the Royal College of Art. 

Bibliography
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Barthes, R., ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989)
Barthelme, D., ‘See the Moon?’, in Sixty Stories (London: Penguin, 2003)
Bishop, E., ‘The Man-Moth’, in Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (New York: The Library of America, 2008)
Wilde, O., Lady Windermere’s Fan, in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2009)
Thoreau, H. D., ‘Solitude’, in Walden, ed. by Joseph Wood Krutch (New York: Bantam, 1962)