30 on Eclipses

eclipse also magnificently defies On photographic representation. Capturing an eclipse’s image or recounting it through language is akin Eclipses to fleshing out an imperishable portrait of a fleeting ghost. While a total solar eclipse When Language and predictably occurs somewhere on the Photography Fail planet approximately once every 18 months, the August 21, 2017 eclipse was the first to align above the United On August 21, the earth, moon, and States in 38 years, with the last sun’s celestial postures aligned in occurring on February 26, 1979.6 performance of the perfect spectral Recognizing the uncanny qualities of mirage: the moon appeared to slip this celestial affair, both Sarah from its orbit, and like an unknown Charlesworth and Annie Dillard body blotting out the light at the end employed the 1979 eclipse as subject of a narrow tunnel, briefly obscured matter for two distinct works that the violent, ultraviolet orb of the sun. mined its respective photographic In Los Angeles, outside the and poetic properties. slender path of totality that threaded In Dillard’s classic essay, “Total across the contiguous United States, Eclipse,” the author intimately the sun remained as a sliver, a toenail, recounts her personal experience of or a fractured oval; the drop in air the eclipse, narrating the ways in temperature was only marginally which language becomes unmoored perceptible. A naked glance upwards from the actual somatic experience of would be rewarded with a crescent- being consumed by the moon’s shaped scar seared into the retina. shadow (“Language can give no sense Elsewhere, those situated within of this sort of speed”7). Pondering the the path of totality would be seized by limits of language, Dillard frequently a lunar tempest: a disc of shadow turns to the language of photography, would defiantly cloak the sun and excavating the points at which image assail the terrestrial plane below, and prose meet: “The sky snapped moving at an upward speed of nearly over the sun like a lens cover. The 3,000 miles per hour.1 At the moment hatch in the brain slammed.”8 of total eclipse, twilight would As she continues to navigate an emerge, the sun’s corona would array of complex visual metaphors, careen into view, and the visible color she ultimately asserts that, as spectrum would appear to lilt and language crumples in the aftermath shift. While this rapturous solar void of totality, so does its photographic has been lyrically imparted as “a brethren. “You have seen photographs forsaking”2 (Anne Carson), a fatal of the sun taken during a total eclipse. “defeat”3 (Virginia Woolf), and “a slug The corona fills the print… The lenses of anaesthetic up your arm”4 (Annie of telescopes and cameras can no Dillard), by all accounts, the corporeal more cover the breadth and scale of experience of this phenomenon is the visual array than language can truly invulnerable to being shaped by language. Existing in what Sarah Charlesworth describes as a liminal Jessica Simmons is an artist and writer based state of “All Light & No Light,”5 an in Los Angeles. 30 Jessica Simmons Feature 1 Sarah Charlesworth, The Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979 (1979, printed 2012) (detail), from the series Modern History. 29 Fuji Crystal Archive prints, each 22 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Seymour and Alyce Lazar, new printing made possible by a bequest of Phoebe Apperson Hearst by exchange. © 2017 The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. 2 Sarah Charlesworth: 3 Doubleworld at Los Angeles Leonardo Katz, Lunar County Museum of Art, August Typewriter (1977-1978). Image 20, 2017–February 4, 2018 courtesy of The Getty Museum (installation view). © Estate of and of Henrique Faria Fine Art. Sarah Charlesworth. Image © Museum Associates/LACMA. cover the breadth and simultaneity of Charlesworth deploys photo- internal experience.”9 graphic processes to point to the Here, the problem of memorial- medium’s own blindspot, unearthing a izing the eclipse emerges. Dillard beguiling riddle: despite inherently suggests that both poetry and embodying the physical and optical photography function as mediators of interplay of light, shadow, and object a primal experience, and as such that the mechanism of photography exhibit tragic flaws when tasked to employs, a total eclipse fundamentally quantify the visual and emotional eludes the parameters of photographic contours of a total eclipse. While representation. An eclipse is an Dillard’s linguistic focus is largely optical lacuna: an oblique, fugitive internal, intimate, and personal, state marked by the dual presence Sarah Charlesworth’s The Arc of and absence of light, which renders it Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979 metaphorically (and in most cases, (1979, currently on view at LACMA), physically11) unphotographable. dissects the problem of photographic Only the most advanced telescopic representation by focusing on the lenses can capture an eclipse in any wider point of public dissemination. detail, and the resulting physical Visually tracing the geographic arc image is a beautifully tidy abstraction— of the 1979 eclipse, Charlesworth a finite yet disembodied emblem photographically reproduces the front of an already abstract occurrence. pages of 29 newspapers headlining Immense, uncapturable, and the eclipse, all from communities uncategorizable, an eclipse ultimately within the path of totality. Stripped untethers the visual world from its of all accompanying text and verbal reference point. image aside from the publications’ If the 1979 total solar eclipse mastheads and photographs of the confounded modes of conceptual and eclipse, the work presents the optical representation, the 2017 phenomenon as a compositional eclipse exponentially compounded abstraction that threads through these representational dilemmas. a series of nearly empty frames. On the morning of August 21, as Interestingly, despite hailing the needs of my newborn forbade from diverse geographic points along me from venturing outside, I tacitly the eclipse’s trajectory, many of the watched the crescent-shaped newspapers use identical images of projections of a partially eclipsed sun the cosmological occurrence,10 emerge from the dappled light undermining the unspoken insinuation filtering through my window. While that each offers unique, firsthand simultaneously scrolling through reportage of a newsworthy event. my friends’ geographically scattered As duplicates of reproductions of posts and hashtags, I streamed already mediated images, the NASA’s live video feed of the photographs in question function as moment of totality. Every major viral facsimiles, visual surrogates news channel boasted dedicated incapable of truly “reporting” the coverage of the eclipse, revealing moment for which they stand. By disquietingly large throngs of people erasing the remaining content of the congregating in fields and stadiums, newspapers’ covers, Charlesworth gazing skywards as if anticipating further contextually dilutes a moment the unfurling of the apocalypse that is already more hallucinogenic (and by Dillard’s reading, perhaps than it is concrete. they were). 1. Elizabeth Zubritsky, “The Moon is Front and Center 2. Anne Carson, “Totality: The Color of Eclipse,” Cabinet, During a Total Solar Eclipse,” NASA.gov, July 21, 2017, Issue 12: The Enemy (Fall/Winter 2013), https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/the-moon- http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/carson.php. is-front-and-center-during-a-total-solar-eclipse. 3. Ibid., as quoted. In fact, over 200 million people possibly illuminate light’s own jarring viewed or experienced the eclipse.12 retreat? Both become the modes Exacerbating the dilemma of through which our internal experience photography set forth by Dillard and of external phenomena are mediated. Charlesworth, most of these Like an object in a viewfinder spectators witnessed the eclipse, as slipping from focus, like our I did, through varying degrees of eclipse-battered senses “receding the photographic mediation: through a way galaxies recede to the rim of live feed or on social media, through space,”16 the moon methodically filtered lenses, or through the irregular recedes from the earth each year at a shadows cast by found or handmade glacial pace. In 600 million years, as projectors. If the eclipse itself the moon’s synchronous orbit finally embodied the mechanics of photogra- surrenders its ability to veil the sun, phy, so did attempts at viewing it— the last total solar eclipse will align our eyes became lenses protected by above the terrestrial horizon.17 In a filters, our iPhones became surrogates fitting end to this metaphor, like an for our eyes, and our bodies bore the unfixed image that dissipates in the apparatus of homemade camera sun, or a momentary mincing of obscuras.13 And, on the fringes of words, an eclipse is a fleeting, totality, lest there be millions of newly mercurial anomaly—it evades all forged retinal scars, we turned our forms of permanence, just as it backs to the light en masse in a evades all modes of representation. postmodern performance of Plato’s philosophical parable. In an inadvertent rendition of Charlesworth’s Arc, most networks aired live video footage of the moment of totality as it rhythmically unfolded above the various communities along its geographic path. As the 6. See NASA’s online database of maps of solar eclipses in North America: https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmap/ sun and moon appeared to collide, a SEmapNA.html. moment of rapt silence was punctuated by a chorus of screams—a spectacle 7. Dillard, 21. of primal rapture performed for the 8. Dillard, 11. mediated vantage points of news 9. Dillard, 14. cameras and social media.14 This peculiar primitive phenomenon, also 10. Mark Godfrey, “Modern History,” Sarah Charlesworth (New York: Prestel, 2017), 138. recounted by Dillard, marks the precise moment that language begins 11. See instructions for and the limitations of photo- graphing the eclipse: http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/ to disintegrate.

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