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Images of faces preoccupied with the telescope seem to be performances. Though in other ways, the person also seems to have left their body altogether. One’s face contorts or responds, exclaims, or mirrors the object of their gaze. We sit here on Earth, in the same place as moments earlier, but when gazing at the sun we have also been transported nearly 93 million miles away. In two places at once.
I knew that when I made this photograph of Drew, in Upstate NY in 2018, I had found something to explore. One eye at work with the telescope, the other being covered. The telescope is a perceptive machine, much as the eye is, and the camera, or what Jonathan Crary calls Subjective Vision. These images are meant to relay the ambiguity of existing in two places at once. Even though we cannot see what Drew can see, can we imagine?
David Steinberg is part of Der Greif X Grisebach: “New Positions”.
Check out his Artist Feature Ouroboros.