Photograph by Chris McCaw

What the Sun Says

In 1605 German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler presented his first ‘law’ of orbits, stating that all planets move in elliptical orbits, with the sun as center focus. Earning the title, founder of modern optics, Kepler was also the first to consider picture-making with the pinhole camera. But it was his theories on the sun’s rotation about its axis (derived without the use of a telescope) that revolutionized the consideration of time and space and our relative place within the sky.  

“Discover the force of the heavens O Men: once recognised it can be put to use,” Kepler wrote in De Fundamentis, published in 1601.

"The title, which references the mechanized and often detached character of the image, reflects Rodo-Vankeulen's interest in the nature of pictures as a realm for visual, poetic and conceptual possibility."

Photography is a medium like no other. With a simple tool called the camera, a person is able to freeze a fraction of a moment in time, record it, and cherish that moment forever. However, despite this engaging motif, many photographs that we see in our daily lives today, have become mundane and normal, no longer representing the capture of the fleeting moment. By opening up new ways of seeing and new contextual spaces, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen reveals the sophisticated visual dynamic that is embedded in all images.

Photographer Darek Fortas’ most recent project, Coal Story, is a personal response to the history and aftermath of the Solidarity movement in Poland. The movement — led by human-rights activist Lech Wałęsa — was paramount for Poland’s labor parties and trade unions and their rise to independence throughout the 1980s. In approaching the subject photographically, Mr. Fortas — who is now based in Ireland, but originally from Poland — culled images from photographic archives dating back to the 1960s. Using these historic images of Polish coal miners in addition to his own large-format photographs of the present day, Fortas’ Coal Story takes place before, during, and after the uprising of Solidarity. Read a recent interview about the project between Fortas and Daylight below.

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Interview by Trent Davis Bailey
Photographs by Darek Fortas

How is the hallowed tradition of landscape photography changing? Where can its most exciting new practitioners be found? How does it intersect with documentary photography?

This Thursday, October 23rd, Join Orion Magazine for Landscape and Loss, a special live web event featuring photographer Matt Black, to discuss photographic projects which depict landscape to tell a story. 

Matt Black's most recent body of work, After the Fall, chronicles the story of Santiago Mitlatongo, a town that sits on a landmass that is moving about a yard per day.