Rhodes professors’ photo art hints at powerful forces and evolutionary possibilities
Two professors, both in love with photography.
One lives for training his huge lenses into the sky capturing billions of stars exploding thousands of light years away, the other has waited all her life to get a camera capable of photographing the infinitesimally small elements of life.
In an unlikely collaboration, renowned maths educator Professor Marc Schäfer and conservation and environment researcher Professor Ingrid Schudel produced a set of photographs for the National Arts Festival which meld his astral images shot from a self-built observatory in the Winterberg mountains above Adelaide, and her startling shots of furry seeds in flight.
We are sky’s things exhibiting at Rhodes University’s professional development centre from 9am to 4pm until Saturday also features a film showing the slow merging of photographs to make the final image.
It is accompanied by a soundtrack by Dutch composer Jeroen Roffel who recorded the sound of a crystal glass being dropped on a hard floor and extended and produced the sound for 18 minutes to create the track.
Artist Mark Wilby was the consulting curator.
In the film, the photographers play with colour, shape, pattern and movement between earth and sky.
Schäfer, who is intrigued by the philosophy of mathematics and how it is best taught and understood, said his astro-photography from his observatory fed his fascination with the cosmos which he described as “inconceivably vast, yet gratifyingly beautiful.
“The images are an attempt to understand a cosmos that is seemingly orderly and mathematical, yet also wild, exquisite and explosive.”
Schudel, a former researcher at the Thomas Baines Reserve outside Makhanda, researches and teaches science and environmental education at Rhodes.
She said her macro-lens was her companion in scientific explorations.
“It offers precision, detail and clarity to highlight the unexpected and under-valued in the micro-cosmos.”
She adjusted focus, perspective, compositions and movement “in playful recognition of uncertainty, unpredictability and unfathomability — concepts of equal importance to scientific interpretation and representation”.
In exhibition notes, the photographers said astroand macro-photography “draw our gaze into boundless spaces.
“From a speck in the universe — the Eastern Cape — Marc turns his camera to the cosmos; while Ingrid points hers to tiny earth-bound subjects.
“The images and mergers between the two hint at powerful forces, infinite scales of time and space, order and chaos, and metamorphic and evolutionary possibilities in our vast universe.”
The professors said they had been pleasantly surprised at the regular flow of visitors to see the exhibition, and a wall of comments showing pleasure and amazement.