Tanja Lažetić

The Skeis Above Me

Photography, 2015

I take a photograph of the night sky every day, and often this is the last thing I do that day. I then cut the photograph into a circle and make some kind of a black hole. The outlines of clouds are visible on the photographs, but still, these are just various shades of black with fewer or more white dots if the sky is clear, or one large dot if the moon enters the frame. Yet the night is not nothing. I see the night sky as an image of the subconscious. Nighttime is the other, unknown and dark part of the day, and taking a nightly photograph of the sky is my ritual. At those times, only the sky is above me.

I took my first pictures of the night sky last year in Shanghai. There, the night sky is a thick crust, illuminated by a million lights, devoid of stars. Only when the wind was blowing did I not feel as if under a lid of some kind. Sometimes the wind would blow a chink in the clouds and then the twinkle of some far-away star would become visible, if only briefly. I began photographing the sky out of boredom, and because there were no stars, I documented the clouds. Their shapes were constantly changing, and no one moment resembled the one before it. That very short time spent observing the sky was a special instance of being-inthe-moment.

Early in the morning, when the dark gray sky lightened, a different star would shine in the sky above Shanghai. An old gentleman, one of the many kite-fliers on the riverbank, flew a kite in the shape of a red star every morning. Because the sky was cloudy the red star shone all the brighter, and sometimes for weeks on end the only star in the sky above Shanghai was a red star.

I took my first photograph of the night sky on 18 June 2015.

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