Luke Foley-Martin & Ben Lowe
Catalogue of the Fixed and Wandering
Ben Lowe, 7:15-8:00pm, 13 August 2022, Full Moon 10:30-10:35pm, 21 August 2021 Luke Foley-Martin, Dazzling Orbit Black Hole in the Sky12:00-5:00am 9 September 2021, New MoonEternal Vibrance 8:45pm-4;45am 7-8 October 2021 7:45-8:45pm 12 May 2022, Waxing Gibbous MoonTo Form a Circle 6:40-7:20pm 12 May 2022, Waxing Gibbous Moon Overexposure2:30-3:00am, 20 March 20239:15-9:30pm, 21 August 2021Poles ApartYou Are The Blue12:00-4:30am, 9 March 2022, Waxing Crescent Moon6:30-10:30pm, 11 August 2021, Waxing Crescent Moon (and Venus) Sun Break 4:30-4:50am , 16 April 2023, Waning Crescent MoonBen Lowe, 10:10pm-12:00am, 8-9 November 2022, Lunar Eclipse10:30pm-3:30am, 15-16 April 2023, Waning Crescent MoonLuke Foley-Martin, Solar Winds
Essay by Theo Macdonald
Stars in Their Eyes
On the front cover of my 1993 paperback copy of Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne, beneath King's embossed name and above the book's foil-stamped title, is a bold, brassy, airbrush illustration of a solar eclipse. In the novel, this "big black pupil with a gauzy veil of fire"[i] temporarily grants King's protagonist Dolores second sight. It is a brief supernatural moment in what is, for the most part, a convincing thriller, that doesn't interrupt King's realism because—although most of us might not believe in haunted hotels or sewer-dwelling clowns—the idea that the moon, stars and sun might shape our destiny feels plausible.
Photography has been referred to as the 'handmaiden' of modern astronomy. The introduction of dry plate photography in the late 1870s permitted scientists to record astral forms too faint to be seen with the naked eye. The Black Sun, Tungsten Hills occurred to Ansel Adams, along with the experimental overexposure solarisation process by which it would be achieved, while tramping in the Tungsten Hills, a set of low ridges named for the robust mineral mined there for light bulbs, televisions, thermometers, microwaves, golf clubs and jet engines. Although his deep focus naturalism usually smells of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, The Black Sun offers a Gothic, industrial vision, one redolent of the bleached, burnt, brutal planet from Maurice Gee’s The Halfmen of O: “And everything was grey: a huge grey cloudless sky, grey land, grey hills rolling endlessly down until they were lost in a haze, ashy stunted trees, twisted unnaturally, grass the colour of tin. But worst of all, most hideous of all, burning without colour overhead, a huge black sun, set up there like an iron hot plate in the sky.” [ii] Adams later declared his Black Sun, The Tungsten Hills proof that “the subject may prompt ideas, ideas crave visualisations, and craft makes their realisation possible.”[iii]
Overexposure is one of Luke Foley-Martin’s more pared-back compositions. A pale rose disc floats against a blood-red ground. Gaze into the centre and the glowing orb expands and contracts, the clashing gradients creating impressions of motion, as if the image were breathing. Each photograph in Foley-Martin's Radiant Solitude revises and reconstitutes the sun through manipulations of position, colour, backdrop and frequency. Some derive from 35mm negatives, made through improvisation with long-focus lenses and varied filters, others as cameraless darkroom prints. The sublime clarity of these RA-4[iv] constellations proposes a complete solar system, evoking the invented auroras of photographer Megan Jenkinson’s Atmospheric Optics, as well as science fiction paperbacks, Scientology pamphlets, pain relief packaging and progressive rock record sleeves. Radiant Solitude recalls a divine, naive past when Venus was a star, and that star was the Devil.
Stars can be bad omens—devils—or good. Claude Monet claimed to be "born under an evil star", Albert King "under a bad sign". In ancient China and Babylon, lunar eclipses were interpreted as threats to ruling monarchs. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's attack on the Flower Child generation is preceded, in the film's opening credits, by a burnt montage of solar fire. The first total solar eclipse in Aotearoa following European settlement—ten occurred between Māori settlement and Cook's arrival—was on 9 September 1885. Reporting for The Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, John Meeson, an enthusiastic member of the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, wrote, "All nature seemed to bow its head, and stand in mute silence as the awful spectacle passed, and until the God of Day should again emerge from his temporary seclusion. The general appearance of things at the moment of totality, which was certainly not a period of complete darkness—for a soft and ‘dim, religious light’ was always present—was such as the observer can surely never forget. It was decidedly uncanny."[v]
But stars are also friends, and family, to Polynesian navigators voyaging across Moana Oceania, the Three Wise Men following the Star of Bethlehem, and citizens of places like Birdlings Flat, who oppose the imposition of street lights. Plus, of course, the eyes of Tāwhirimātea: Matariki. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a plastic cup with printed stars on its bottom signifies independence and sovereignty.
Stretched into falling ribbons of light, the stars in Ben Lowe’s tall, thin, long-exposure landscape photographs appear friendly. For his series Here, Lowe uses a 6x12 medium format camera placed on its side, deploying the anachronistic mode of panorama photography much as Joyce Campbell uses the daguerreotype—to induce conversations about “modernity and obsolescence and the evidentiary role of photography”[vi]. Lowe’s vertical landscapes, wedding sky and earth, invoke the parting of Ranginui and Papatūānuku that so infuriated the god of the wind. Arcs of light swoop and zigzag from left to right, top to bottom, around in circles and interrupted by branches and rain, rocks and water. Mixed into the planets and stars are cars, satellites, boats and planes—a flurry of transport and motion. To this flurry, Lowe brings stillness; a practice of walking through the night, along the trails of Te Rimurapa and Te Kopahou Reserve, and sleeping under the stars.
And the stars look very different today. Clamber up Maungakiekie sometime before dawn this coming June, and your view of Matariki’s rise might be interrupted by a passing Starlink constellation. Satellite—from the Latin “satelles”, meaning a follower or escort of an important person—no longer denotes a naturally occurring celestial body. Roughly 10,000 and counting spacecraft orbit Earth, a fair few launched from our own soil. Applications include atmospheric surveillance, weather forecasting, climate monitoring, broadcasting television, radio and the internet, military reconnaissance and drone targeting—War hawks like to point out that satellites enable GPS. Some may even be nuclear-armed. According to a North Korean research paper, a nuclear weapon detonated between 30 and 100 kilometres above enemy territory would produce an electromagnetic pulse wiping out electrical grids and communications structures.
On the surface of things, the works of Lowe and Foley-Martin have little in common beyond a broad theme: celestial bodies. One deals in precise places—Te Rimurapa and Te Kopahou reserve specifically, Aotearoa more generally—the other in symbols and signification. Foley-Martin produces studied supernovas, Lowe frenetic monochromes. What both share is a patterning of discipline and chance, light and time. The impulse to experiment means working blind, Foley-Martin printing in the dark, Lowe making his slow exposures without immediate gratification. They express a sense of order—the camera is a tool to structure the abstract world—through controlled methods. These are material-led practices, creating images through a photochemical gaze that transcends human sight.
Ten photographers documented the 1885 eclipse, in Nelson, Wellington, Taonui, Tahoraiti, Masterton and Blenheim. Another solar eclipse, a partial one, will be visible from Aotearoa next September. Many more than ten photographers will document this phenomenon, on smartphones, digital cameras, Instax Minis and GoPros. Will Luke Foley-Martin and Ben Lowe be among them? What tools will they use?
References
i. King, Stephen. Dolores Claiborne. New English Library, 1993 (first published 1992).
ii. Gee, Maurice. The Halfmen of O. Oxford University Press, 1982.
iii. Adams, Ansel. Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. Little, Brown and Company, 1989.
iv. RA-4 is (Kodak’s proprietary) C-type chromogenic photographic printing process.
v. JT Meeson et al. "The Total Eclipse of the Sun of the 9th September, 1885; being a Digest of the following Communications to the Institute on the subject". Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 18, 1885, pg 377. Accessed online: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/TPRSNZ1885-18.2.5.1.59
vi. Joyce Campbell. "Last Light: Antarctica." gender on ice gallery, S&F Online. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/ice/gallery/campbell.htm.
Luke Foley-Martin bio
Ben Lowe bio
Theo Macdonald bio