“Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources of swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”
-Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”
The incredible photographs below capture the ephemeral night sky of Victoria, Australia and its star-trail patterns. Photographer Lincoln Harrison takes photos over the course of 15 hours and combines these hundreds of images to wonderfully represent that which we would never be able to see with the naked eye.
“The colourful spirals are the result of the earth's rotation, which gives the impression the stars are hurtling across the horizon.”
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