Burnt By the Sun

Drawing on the Greek myth of Icarus, a series reflecting on a catastrophic future for the youth, caught between climate change and artificial intelligence. My 10 year old asked after seeing images of violent storms on TV, 'What if the sun goes out?

Burnt By the Sun

My 10 year old son asked me after seeing images of violent storms and climate change on TV, 'what happens if the sun goes out?' I thought long and hard about this, wondering ito myself if the youth understand that in some ways, maybe not literally but symbolically, the sun may be going out...

Some of the photographs in the series were taken at fun run at his school, where glow- in- the -dark runners are illuminated with ultraviolet light as they navigate curtains of water and foam.

Ultraviolet rays are short light waves produced by the sun. The concept of ultraviolet light was discovered by Johann Ritter in the early 1800s. How far we have come, right? In the gloom after twilight, ultraviolet light on faces for me has an apocalyptic feel, everything reversed like a film negative. A child exiting a crush of bubbles and bodies evoked for me, the proto-expressionist artwork by Edvard Munch, "The Scream", which depicts a deformed human figure screaming in a landscape with unnatural colors. The work was created in 1898 and has become a popular representation of the human condition and an icon of 'the anxiety of modern life.' That was then and this is now.

Right now there seems to be more to be anxious about than ever before, with climate destruction and artificial intelligence changing the interface of the human soul. Like Icarus whose wax wings melted as he flew too close to the sun, what is revealed about our human 'poetics' and vulnerability as we chase the fatal sun of robot creativity?

Photographing a made-up child closing her sparkling green eyelids against the sun, I wondered to myself, can we see our futures more clearly when we close our eyes, when are minds are dark and still?What aspects of ourselves are healed and revealed when we acknowledge the darker parts of ourselves and of humanity?

Patiently I photographed a child eating a mushroom cloud of candy floss as the gossamer mass slowly obscured his face. Is there a silver lining to an atomic bomb?