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The Sun Is God
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The trouble with famous last words is that we must usually rely on someone else’s say-so that the departed actually said what he said before breathing his last. The speaker, having expired, is no longer in a position to confirm or deny it. So it is with the final words of the great English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, who supposedly bowed out with these words: “The sun is God.” Anyone who knows anything about his work would, of course, instantly recognize the appropriateness of such an exit line, which makes it just a wee bit too tidy. On the other hand, they would also agree if he didn’t actually say as much, he ought to have.
“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot,” Picasso once said; “others transform a yellow spot into the sun.” Turner was decidedly one of the latter, although in his case it would be a gross understatement to say so. Turner’s canvasses have been described as “detonations of light,” and so they are. The sun does not so much dominate the sky as devour it in thick effusions of white and yellow and red. Generations before the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists, Turner dispensed with form in favor of light and atmosphere. The art critic John Ruskin, an early champion of Turner’s work, acknowledged that he was something of an “infidel” and “a sun worshiper of the old breed.” Turner would stare directly into the sun for such extended periods that onlookers wondered how he could do so without destroying his eyesight. "It hurts my eyes no more than it would hurt yours to look at a candle," he assured them.
Pagan though he might be, Turner’s fixation on the sun would apply in some measure to every landscape artist, not the least photographers like myself. If a good photograph is knowing where to stand, as Ansel Adams once said, then we might add it is knowing where to stand in relation to the sun. To begin with, you can’t point the camera directly at the sun, except at the extremes of the day. Shooting into the sun is possible at dawn and dusk only because the sun is actually below the horizon, its rays refracted in the atmosphere. Pointing a camera anywhere near the sun when it is much above the horizon will produce lens flare or a blown-out image.
GPS technology and the Internet have made it possible for photographers to map the position of the sun (and moon) for any time on any day in any part of the world. The day after Christmas I ventured out early to take pictures on a hill overlooking tidal wetlands near the Connecticut River south of Hartford. I was there before sunrise just as the light was spilling over the horizon and reflecting off a pond below. I lived nearby, so I knew when the sun would be coming up and where to position my camera and tripod to catch the light. But if I were a stranger to these parts, the app would tell me the exact time sunrise would occur and the sun’s precise coordinates on the southeast horizon five days after the winter solstice.
The purpose of such software, by and large, is not to enable you to point your camera toward the sun but to know where to aim away from it. If the sun were God, photographers would find themselves in a position akin to the ancient Hebrews who longed to look upon the Lord but found he was forever veiled from their sight. The ancients believed you could not look directly upon God and live. Thus, Moses hid himself in the cleft of a rock on Mt. Sinai as the Lord passed by so he would survive the encounter. If the sun were God, it might not appear in any photograph, but its light would announce its presence with every object it fell upon.
John D'Agostino, "The Significance of Light"
The Photographer's Ephemeris (www.photoephemeris.com)
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