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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
What is a photograph? Mostly we know it as a preserved image of the world approximating our own visual perception, for the camera works in a similar way to the eye. So what sort of image of the world has Darren Glass made? It looks like something produced for scientific purposes. The tracings of electrical discharges for example — like a controlled mini-lightning field. Or perhaps it shows the antics of high-energy subatomic particles traced in a cloud or bubble chamber? Alternatively, the circular frame could mean that this is a microscope image of tiny organisms connected by glowing threads.
A more wide-ranging imagination might see tiny alien entities gathering around their leader; or a mandala of spiritual energy that recalls Kirlian photography, where electrical discharges around objects create images that some believe correspond to psychic auras.
The truth is somewhat more prosaic, though the implications are not necessarily any less wondrous. Darren Glass turned a Frisbee into a camera by making seven pinholes into its upper surface and placing a sheet of film beneath. Each pinhole was in effect a super-wide-angle lens. The lines are tracings of the sun’s moving image over the Frisbee’s flight. The short paths may represent the moment Glass drew back his arm and flicked his wrist to throw; the circular ones the spinning disc during flight; and the longer wiggly lines the Frisbee bumping along the ground on landing. Look carefully and you will see these terminating in a bright spot within an image of sky and clouds created when the disc came to rest, before Glass arrived to scoop it up into a light-proof bag.
In the early days of photography it was said that the invention allowed nature to draw its own likeness, superseding the work of the human hand. As we have explored the new tool in ever-expanding ways, we have often found nature representing itself in images that bear little resemblance to our own, limited, optical view of it. Like so many inventions, photography has opened up realities beyond our experience and imagination. Glass’s Frisbee images take us on one such journey.
Athol McCredie