Burnt By the Sun

Drawing on the Greek myth of Icarus, a portrait series photographed in ultraviolet light, reflecting on the future for the youth, damned by climate change and the uncertainty of artificial intelligence.

Burnt By the Sun

This book project, Burnt by the Sun reflects on two issues that have probably damned future generations  - climate change and artificial intelligence.The series was inspired in part by the story of Icarus, in Greek mythology, son of the inventor Daedalus who perished by flying too close to the Sun with waxen wings. At an annual school fun in Johannesburg, children have to complete several laps on a track that is lit by huge ultraviolet lights.Foam is sprayed onto the course,creating chaos. Watching children collide and crumple into indigo heaps made me think of the vulnerability of the human race at the coal face of new technologies and older world problems like climate change. While watching an extreme weather event in America on TV, my 10 year old son asked me, “What if the sun goes out?’ We discussed the fear and reality of this and then I said,’what happens if our human sun, our soul goes out?’With greed for fossil fuels turning the world into a furnace and AI apparently replacing jobs, what does the youth look forward to? Are they angry at the world they have inherited ? Are they angry enough?

Ultraviolet rays are short light waves produced by the sun. The concept of ultraviolet light was discovered by Johann Ritter in the early 1800s. In the gloom after twilight, ultraviolet light has an otherworldly, apocalyptic feel. Faces look reversed, like a photographic 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.'

Artificial intelligence is changing the way people interface with each other and the world. Like Icarus whose wax wings melted as he flew too close to the sun, what is revealed about our vulnerability as we chase the fatal sun of robot creativity?

Photographing a child closing 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?

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?