From Above and Below features ten years of Sharon Harper’s conceptual photographs and video stills exploring perception, technology and the night sky. Her experimental images of the moon, stars and sun draw on scientific and artistic uses of photography to illuminate the medium’s contradictory ability to both verify empirical evidence and to create poetic connections between our environment and ourselves. If one cannot gaze directly into the sun of the sublime, Harper offers the scarred and streaked transparences and prints of her attempts to do so, made manifest through the mediation of photographic and telescopic technology, and through the framework of time. Through Harper’s repeated long exposures, with time spans of hours to a month, star trails turn to star scratches, landscapes and cloud formations shift and the sublime is slowed to a trace made visible to the eye.
Featured image is reproduced from Sharon Harper: From Above and Below.
Tonight, from 6-7:30 p.m., photographer Sharon Harper will sign copies of From Above and Below—her exquisite new exploration of the night sky from Radius Books—at the International Center of Photography in New York. Harper, whose work was the subject of a one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2001, is Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Featured photograph, "One Month, Weather Permitting" (2009)—of the night sky over Banff, Alberta, September 12 - October 10, 2007—is reproduced from Sharon Harper: From Above and Below. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 11 x 14 in. / 120 pgs / 39 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $72.5 GBP £50.00 ISBN: 9781934435526 PUBLISHER: Radius Books AVAILABLE: 11/30/2012 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Radius Books. Text by Jimena Canales, Phillip Prodger.
From Above and Below features ten years of Sharon Harper’s conceptual photographs and video stills exploring perception, technology and the night sky. Her experimental images of the moon, stars and sun draw on scientific and artistic uses of photography to illuminate the medium’s contradictory ability to both verify empirical evidence and to create poetic connections between our environment and ourselves. If one cannot gaze directly into the sun of the sublime, Harper offers the scarred and streaked transparences and prints of her attempts to do so, made manifest through the mediation of photographic and telescopic technology, and through the framework of time. Through Harper’s repeated long exposures, with time spans of hours to a month, star trails turn to star scratches, landscapes and cloud formations shift and the sublime is slowed to a trace made visible to the eye.
