The middle ground of light

This is an essay about looking at the sun, which means that it is actually an essay about being unable to do so. The figure at its centre is the solar eclipse, which removes the sun from view but provides the occasion to gather and look for light in the first place. While exceptional, the solar eclipse nonetheless presents a middle or common ground of light – mere light whose limits are realised by a shared witness, akin to the everyday sunset. The sunset and the solar eclipse each chart the point at which light fails, when the sun drops below the horizon or is otherwise occluded. Moving through a series of photographs of the sun, this essay takes the sun's eclipse – that is, the sun's disappearance – as central to photography's own middle ground.