CALTON HILL SOLAR

Calton Hill Solar (2025, 17’ 59”, HD digital video, digital stereo audio), was conceived initially as a site-specific work, made in a studio beside Calton Hill in Edinburgh in close proximity to Rock House, the site during the 1840s of the studio of photographic pioneers David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848). Their calotype process required both long exposures and high levels of light, the only source of which at that time was sunlight and the effect and evidence of sunlight can be seen in many of their images. Hill’s and Adamson’s work in both technological and cultural terms can be considered (literally) as a product of the Scottish enlightenment, through their harnessing and fixing the light of the sun - optically, chemically - and refining their process.

Calton Sun Solar in a sense ‘borrows’ the same sunlight as Hill and Adamson, from virtually the same site, capturing the sun directly, a simple acknowledgement of or parallel to their practices and their localised presence in the city. However, there are wider and further implications to any image of the sun, described by Francis Ponge in 'The Sun Placed in the Abyss' as “the formal and indispensable condition of everything in the world... The condition of sight itself.” "All we can do is contemplate the sun, not directly (for that is impossible), but in its surrogates, its metaphors: in all other things."* This is the inescapable paradox of representing something which it is impossible to gaze at directly, (as in Michel Foucault’s unrepresentable ‘blind spot’), and which we can only really comprehend through its effects and influence. To use the camera to gaze directly at the sun, and to record and represent this is, in effect, to create an ‘impossible’ image. 

Calton Hill Solar was made with the support of the Outer Spaces’ Cube Studio Programme, part of the 2025 Edinburgh Art Festival.

*Allan Stoekl: Ponge's Photographic Rhetoric, SubStance, Vol. 12, No. 4, Issue 41 (1983) The Johns Hopkins University Press