“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
—United States Declaration of Independence, 1776
(Music from Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land sung by Anthony Bowman)
“The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.”
—Wallace Stevens, From his Journal, 1904/1966
Far away as the Sun is from Earth, without it there would likely be no life here. As it is, the Sun greets us in the morning when rising on the eastern horizon. It then seems to travel through the sky from East to West with every degree of Earth’s rotation around its own axis until the Sun sets and eventually disappears under the western horizon.
I shot Rising Sun early in the morning in Beijing when the hustle and bustle outside had woken me up earlier than planned. But had I slept longer, I would have missed this beautiful sight!
“It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought”
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, 1923
Without the Sun there would be no life on Earth. The Sun is a star, a ball of gases that glows, and the brightest object in our sky. It provides warmth and light, enabling us to live the life we are used to. The Sun divides our days into daytime and nighttime and we use its movements through our sky to calculate days and years.
While from our point of view the Sun is moving through our sky, in reality Earth is moving around the Sun. As Earth does not orbit the Sun in an upright but in a slightly tilted position, one of Earth’s poles is sometimes tilted more toward the Sun during the orbit and sometimes tilted away. This axial tilt determines the path the Sun takes through our sky. At the summer solstice the peak of the Sun’s arc across the sky is the highest and in summer the Sun rises and sets farther north in the northern hemisphere.
This year the northern solstice takes place today on June 21 at 10:07 UTC. The June solstice also marks the first day of astronomical summer though meteorological summer already started on the first of June and the June solstice is more often looked at as midsummer in the northern hemisphere. But either way, let’s enjoy the length of day; from now on we’ll get fewer daylight hours!
While still in retreat working on a project, it took me a while to find out that Cloudy Morning Sky Sun received an honorable mention in the fine art category of the International Photography Awards’ One-Shot: Harmony competition.
While the world seems to be filled with discord and conflict at the moment, with this competition the IPA wanted to “highlight the beauty of unity and harmony that exists in all corners and in all aspects of life” and invited photographers from all over the world to share their take on harmony to show “how our differences and unique qualities can bring us together, how beautiful the world is because of the diversity that exists—in nature, in culture, in humanity.”
This theme deeply resonates within me on both a personal and a professional level and I decided to enter Cloudy Morning Sky Sun as my interpretation of harmony. With this image I explore the ancient concept of Yin and Yang, two contrasting but also complimentary forces that interconnect to form a oneness. They ultimately describe duality not opposition: one cannot exist without the other. When both are in balance, harmony exists and oneness remains. When one predominates, the other is weakened and oneness is lost. I split the original image into a colored and a black-and-white part separated by a thin line. While the Sun in the colored part symbolizes Yang, it turns into a Yin-Moon in the black-and-white part. The line represents the Taiji, a border separating Yin and Yang and thereby erst creating duality.
I am absolutely delighted that the jury found my entry worthy of an honorable mention among such a variety of wonderful images. And I continue to believe that while we nowadays seem to live in a world of opposition, our true nature embraces co-existence and harmony.
Yesterday was one of the few nice spring days we’ve had so far, but it still was a bit crisp. The sky was blue but there were also some clouds. Some cirrus clouds got in front of the sun and brought ice crystals with them. These reflected and refracted the white sunlight splitting it up into its various colors and forming a circular halo around the Sun. A really beautiful sight.
