Penelope Umbrico

Suns From Flickr is a project I started in 2006 when, looking for "the most photographed" subject, I found 541,795 photographs of sunsets searching "sunset" on the photo-sharing web site Flickr. At the time that seemed like a lot; today there are more than 4,786,139 hits for "sunset" on Flickr. I think it's peculiar that the sun ? the quintessential life-giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D... and so ubiquitously photographed ? is now subsumed to the internet ? the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed digital circuit.

For this Aperture / 20x200 project, I combined multiple "sunset" and "moonrise" photographs found on Flickr and superimposed them, respectively, in Photoshop. Each photograph is visible to a greater or lesser degree depending on the amount of opacity I give each ? the titles are an indication of this: 87 Suns From Flickr - 29 Visible, and 79 Moons From Flickr - 51 Visible.

The resulting aesthetic seems rooted in a history of abstract visual form (from Klee and Kandinski to Star Trek and black-light posters), where the images move away from a reality we know, towards an abstraction of that reality based on fiction and psychedelic cosmic fantasy. As reflection of the ever-increasing use of web-based photo communities, my collating oaf found sunset and moonrise pictures results in images that are inherently reflexive of the pre-scripted collective content found there.

79 Moons is a benefit edition for the Aperture foundation. Full information.

Jen's newsletter on these editions can be found here.