Sky Album
150 years of capturing clouds
A proposal by Archive of Modern Conflict
Coproduced by Fotografia Europea
Cloud features 150 works – including photographs, albums, and books – that range from the origins of photography to the dawn of satellite imagery, most of them drawn from the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict.
At the dawn of photography, when photographs required long exposures, taking images of clouds was near impossible. It wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century, with improvements in technique and technology, that photographers could begin capturing the infinite variability of clouds.
So began an avid fixation with the subject, an affinity that has since generated innumerable images: often for scientific uses, such as developing an international naming system or visualizing cloud movement on a planetary scale, but also for impassioned artistic purposes. Noted are the abundance of serial, repetitive and obsessional approaches, with some photographers dedicating years of their lives to framing the sky. The ghost of abstraction looms over these images, and a sense of focus proves elusive: In a photograph of a cloud, how is blurriness gauged, or droplets distinguished from grain or pixelation?
The exhibition celebrates the breadth and beauty of images of clouds and the uniqueness of the passionate practice – of scientists, amateurs, and artists alike – of photographing the sky. Through this, the exhibition draws a picture of the history of the sky, the history of photography, and the ways in which they are intertwined.
Luce Lebart
