Todd R. Forsgren

This is Not an Event Horizon, 2012. 

Every night the stars all seem to revolve around the North Star, Polaris. This isn’t what’s really happening, of course. The effect is actually caused by the earth’s rotation, but it took us humans a long time to figure that out. I’d bet that every night, someone out there somewhere is photographing it. Making star trails. One night that person was me. It is certainly miraculous, but sometimes it also seems like a broken record that is stuck on the same song. This picture is my reflection on our attempts to rediscover known miracles.

999 Attempts to Create a Perfect OrangEclipse (0 stars), 2019.

0 - Part of the reason that eclipses are so spectacular on the planet earth is due to the relationship it has with two other celestial bodies: the sun and the moon. Though sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the moon, the sun is also 400 times farther away than the moon. Thus, from earth, they have the same relative size. It’s quite a miraculous coincidence.

One can create a similar relationship between the sun and a clementine (the smallest of the mandarin oranges, at approximately five centimeters). The clementine needs to be about five meters away from a viewer on the surface of the earth. I tried to create a solar eclipse with a clementine on a bright sunny day on the beach that is just west of LAX airport.

I made 999 attempts (that is, tossing up the clementine 999 times and taking a photo). This first set of images is of all of my ‘total failures.’ The photographs where the clementine is not in the frame at all. Like all of my photographic pursuits, my total failures were even more numerous than the partial successes.

999 Attempts to Create a Perfect OrangEclipse (1 star), 2019.

★ – I’ve judged my attempts along the ubiquitous five-star scale that is used to judge so many aspects of contemporary life. This grid shows all of the “one star” photographs. Unlike the total failures, one star means that the images contain both the sun and the clementine. But the two spheres don’t bear any apparent relationship to each other.

At moments during my attempt to create an orangeclipse, I felt like I was creating a strange game with a camera and a clementine that was reminiscent of baseball, skee ball, basketball or bowling. The rules were arbitrary and absurd. My odds of success were very low (endurance has always been my superpower). Throughout the process I didn’t improve much.

As I judged my successes and failures along this five-star scale, I got to thinking about this system in relation to our star, the sun. And how it is so embedded into the software I use to measure the success or failure of photographs (in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge, for example). One star is enough to sustain life on earth, but it’s not enough. 

999 Attempts to Create a Perfect OrangEclipse (2 stars), 2019.

★ ★ – My rating of two stars is for the ‘better failures.’ This grid shows the images I captured when the clementine and the sun started to bare some relationship to each other in comparison to the four edges of my photographic frame. I began to imagine living in a world with millions of little orange moons zipping around just above our heads...

What if geosynchronous orbit was five meters instead of 35,786 km? Space exploration has always been fueled by strange circumstances: the politics of the space race of the Post-War era or the eccentric billionaires who are propelling commercial space flight today. If we just had to launch satellites five meters, then the technology would be so much more democratic.

Actually, the technology would likely be much like what was developed by Elbert Budin in the 1970s for his food photography (which changed the food photo industry forever). Budin made strange machines to launching food in repeatable ways so that it could be photographed. If I had one of his machines for my clementines, perhaps my rate of success would be a bit higher. 

999 Attempts to Create a Perfect OrangEclipse (3 stars), 2019.

★ ★ ★ – Congratulations, photograph, you have made it to three stars! That means you’re not a total failure! That means that you’re among the 11% of photographs that aren’t failures. Instead, you are a partial eclipse. Some part of the clementine is obscuring part of the sun. It’s less than 50% of the area of the sun that is covered, but that’s better than nothing.

The odds seem better than that of the Voyager Satellite’s Golden Record being found by some aliens species in deep space. These satellites are farther from the earth than any other manmade object we know of. At the time of writing, Voyager 1 is more than 20,000,000,000 km away and Voyager 2 is more than 17,000,000,000 km away.

Pale Blue Dot of Earth is a photograph of earth taken by Voyager 1 from 6,000,000,000 km in 1990. On seeing it, Carl Sagan, the visionary astronomer responsible for the esoteric aspects of Voyager, wrote “our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” This was just before distance and resolution made it impossible for the satellite to photograph earth.

999 Attempts to Create a Perfect OrangEclipse (4 stars), 2019.

★ ★ ★ ★ – Wow, here we are at four stars. It has been quite a journey. These images are among the top 3% of my 999 attempts to make a perfect orangeclipse. These images are majority eclipses, where most of the sun has been blocked by a little tiny clementine. What are the odds? Well, 3%, apparently.

I suppose that this is a good time to answer how and why I picked an orange as the object to send into orbit... There are a multitude of reasons, really. As I was thinking about new moons, the Chinese Lunar New Year came to mind. During that holiday, oranges are a symbol of good fortune. I knew that I’d need a lot of luck, so an orange like a good replacement for the moon.

But orange is the compliment of blue too, so it seemed like a good negative version of the Pale Blue Dot from Voyager’s photograph. And the size seemed just about right: not too far that I’d hurt my arm throwing it almost 1,000 times. But also, far enough that I’d have time to pull up my camera and take aim after I threw it. A nice medium distance.

999 Attempts to Create a Perfect OrangEclipse (5 stars), 2019.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – Wow, eight total eclipses; less than 1% of my 999 attempts! I should mention they’re not perfect, because in all of these the clementine was significantly closer to me than the five meters required to get that “ring of fire” around the sun. So, even though we made it to five stars, ultimately, I failed at creating a “perfect orangeclipse."

I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from this vis a vis the relative sizes of the sun and the moon… I guess I can say that the chances of having this relationship between the two significant celestial bodies in our sky is significantly less than 1%. But does that point to an intelligent designer or something greater? Nah, take whatever meaning from it you will.

But this is also why I chose to make an apparently incomplete number of attempts: 999 instead of 1,000. That intentionally incomplete set of 999 is a mark of my preconception that failure was the likely outcome of this absurd endeavor. But incompleteness is also hopefulness: Perhaps if I’d tried just one more time, I would’ve achieved perfection.

Stars, Moons, and Planets (Nine Salami Photograms), 2019.

On a hot summer evening, sitting outside at a social event, I found myself stuck between two folks I was struggling to connect with and a big board of charcuterie in front of me. 

As I picked up the slivers of meat and the setting sun glinted through them, I couldn’t help but think how similar some were in both tone and opacity to color negative film. 

So, I went to Whole Foods Market and bought a range of salami and other circular meats sliced at a variety of thicknesses, and I took them into the darkroom to make these photograms. 

Pressing the meat directly against the photo paper, mixing the cyan, magenta, and yellow filters, I tried to create stars and moons and planets out of them, while thinking of the pigs.

Supernovas from Mix CDs: Documentation of the Obliteration of Information, silver gelatin prints, 2016. 

In the late 20th Century and early 21st century, there was rapid technological innovation and change. The world-wide web happened, for example. During this period, I also happened to come of age. Growing up, two technologies held a special symbolic value, offering the promise of better living through innovation. The Compact Disc and the microwave. Today, both these technologies feel dated, like something from my childhood. Which, I guess, they are. 

The CD was born just one year after me, in 1982. It reshaped the audio, video, and data storage industries. These spinning disks contain a long coil of information which can read by an optical drive and 780nm light, (close to infrared in wavelength, on the far edge of visible light). I used to love “burning” disks, making my own personal music mixes or a mix for someone special to me often as a romantic gesture. 

In the 1980s, the microwave oven was rapidly becoming a common household appliance. I remember when my family finally got one; it seemed like magic. These ovens allow for the rapid heading of food using the vibrations caused by microwaves, an invisible wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum between 1mm and 1mm (on the other side of infrared light compared to what CDs use). 

The wavelengths used by these two techs are rarely used in my favorite technology, photography. But I wanted to make photographs of them. And I remembered: put a CD in a microwave, turn on the microwave, and boom, the CD explodes creating visible light. I found those old CDs that I’d burnt or had been burnt for me… and I put them in a microwave oven, on silver gelatin photographic paper, to record the end of that era.

Placing a Rainbow Where the Sun Don't Shine (For Mika), 2017.

Just southwest of the center or Washington D.C. is a section of the city that was built during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. ‘Brutalist’ is what this style of architecture is called; it elevates concrete while minimizing windows. Much of this part of the city is full of government bureaucrats and I find all of it immensely dull. 

My wife Mika works in one of these buildings; round and almost windowless, it was made to hold art rather than bureaucrats. But I find to be the most hideous example of this architectural style (though, oddly, the gallery spaces inside are great). I think that the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden looks like a giant sphincter. 

On a particularly dreary day I was walking to see my wife, and the building seemed particularly depressing. In my pocket was a cheesy photographic filter (it had been in that coat pocket for a few months, waiting for an inspiration)... A photographic filter that makes artificial rainbows. And I found the perfect place to place a rainbow.

Orb, 2018.

In the haze of jetlag, I saw this strange orb floating amongst the birch trees above the path to nowhere.

Battlefield (after Fenton), salt print, 2013. 

Roger Fenton is credited with the first war photo, an image of a vacant road and field littered with cannonballs. He called it "The Valley of the Shadow of Death," Which Samuel L. Jackson quotes in Pulp Fiction (I guess it’s from somewhere in the Bible). Fenton took another image of that same road; it was made from the same spot on the same day, but the cannonballs have been moved around a bit. Art historians have been beyond curious about this mystery, "Which image came first, the chicken or the cannonball?" For a while I pondered this question too, but then I acted. I decided to try to take a photograph a moment before both Fenton's images, and 150 year after it. It's as close as I've ever come to being a war photographer and I hope it’s as close as I ever come to being a war photographer.

White Hole, 2019.

This is an inverted version of the first photograph of a black hole.  The photograph was taken with a complicated array of radio telescopes arranged around the world.  My photo is a simple inversion: positive to negative. This is one of the oldest tricks in our photographic toolbox.  But also similar to the inversion of time and space that happens in black holes.  Or something like that (I'm more biologist and chemist than physicist!).  

Imagining the Big Bang, 2016. 

Physicists have theorized about a moment in the Big Bang when the explosion was much more organized than what we think about when we think “boom.” An orderly exodus from that point of infinite mass; without it the universe would have probably fallen apart before it even started. I think I can see a hint of this order in Edgerton’s images taken nanoseconds after atomic bomb blasts. But way more orderly than even that. This order was held together by dark matter, I think, or something like that (physics is hard). I tried to imagine what it looked like and made this picture.

Smoky Sun, 2021.

In the summer of 2021, wildfires raged across the western United States.

The sky was full of smoke, the landscape was surreal.
I photographed the sun with my iPhone. 

Then six months later I made this with that photo. 

The Rainbow Star or A Physical Manifestation of the Spinning Wheel of Death, 2022

Lunar Landscape, paired 4"x5" ambrotypes, 2013. 

In a world where dry photographic emulsion wasn’t invented, man would’ve had to continue to use wet-plate photographic techniques. I imagined this world, and what would our pictures of the missions to the moon would look like… A wet-plate version of Earthrise, for example. Although it'd be very hard to pour collodion without gravity’s help.

Trying Not to Go Blind, inkjet print with cigarette burn, 2017. 

One evening I was jogging along the Caribbean Sea in southwestern Puerto Rico. I came upon a little bluff overlooking a small secluded little beach, less than 100 meters long. There was a man standing in the middle of that beach, looking out at the sunset. And he was masturbating. At first I thought that this was pretty twisted, but as I reflected on it on my jog back home, I began to see a beautiful poetry to his Quixotic quest. Although he was certainly playing with fire, because both these things can make you go blind.

Shoot the Moon, photograph framed with bullet hole in glass, 2013.

I used to play a computer version of the card game hearts back in the 1990s, on Microsoft Windows v3.1. I played it on a 386 IBM personal computer. I tried to shoot the moon all the time… a risky maneuver in which you get all the bad cards, and that ends up being a good thing). Normally it backfired. But occasionally, when the stars seemed to be aligned, it worked out, the payoff was huge: twenty-six points for each of my opponents. Once, I did it four times in a row for a clean victory: 104 to 104 to 104 to 0. 

Today, I think about shooting the moon in terms of my photography: I’m normally looking for rare and unexpected collision of ideas and images. Sometimes I shoot the moon, and other times I miss horribly. It’s a weird blend of mostly chance and a hint of skill. 

William Herschel was the father of one of the fathers of photography. He was an astronomer and discovered Mimas, a moon circling Saturn that has a very large and striking impact crater on it. The crater is named Herschel too, coincidentally. I often wonder about that big meteor that hit Mimas. What was its name? Who shot that moon?! This photograph is about that unnamed meteor.

Saturn's Rings Reflected in a Pond, 2020.