In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history” — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

Forever and Ever

Heliography for my sons

The oldest photograph has been “living” among us for 200 years. Here is the recipe for “eternity”:

Dissolve 3 grams of Syrian asphalt in 15 ml of lavender oil. Wait a few days. Apply the emulsion with a brush onto white tin. Let the emulsion dry on a hot cast iron plate for about 20 minutes. Expose the plate to sunlight for two to three days. Rinse off the unhardened asphalt emulsion with turpentine or lavender oil.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce called this process heliography. He described it in 1829 in his Notice sur l’Héliographie. This was the first photographic process in which an image captured by a camera obscura was permanently fixed on a metal plate. Niépce is long gone. The image remains.

The heliographs shown here were created between February and December 2017, during my cancer treatment. I made them for my sons, in the months when words failed me. Light and shadow became my language. The notebook stayed empty.

It was not until 2019 that I sorted, titled and framed the works. The occasion was the exhibition at the Interphoto Festival in Białystok, Poland — co-funded by the Polish Ministry of Culture. All works carry the date 2019: the moment they stepped out of the private and became art.

Monday, February 6, 2017.
My wife and I are waiting for the results of my CT scan. The waiting room is narrow. On the left, a large window. Opposite, two doors: Booth 1, Booth 2. Silence. The people sitting here do not speak …
The complete journal is available on Medium: When Light Meets Asphalt →