Philip Braham
DIFFERENT HISTORIES OF LIGHT

The Lumen series of night photographs records human presence in the landscape in real time, often registered as movement through the scene. Aircraft, ships and vehicles set a trajectory towards their purposeful destination; an ambulance racing to hospital in the dead of night, cargo ships steering carefully through the inky darkness, or a silent watchful satellite passing high overhead are recorded as a vector of light through the landscape.

These are records of a world in repose, set against the ancient starlight of an earlier universe. The colour of the light-trails shifts further towards red as its distance from us increases. Thus the Lumen photographs can be read as a time line from the present to the primordial past.