Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2024. 131 pp., 48 images, 10¼x14".
Artist Ala Ebtekar does something similar with his pictures of the moon, mixing science and mysticism, in a new series of cyanotypes published by Radius Books, Thirty-six Views of the Moon. Ebtekar’s photographs of the moon are small, simple compositions — really just basic outlines and descriptions of the lunar surface — but rendered much more complex and profound by combining different strategies discovered by embracing both science and art. The pictures are printed on sensitized pages of books published over the last 10 centuries, each of them addressing the mysteries of the moon in their own unique way. Ebtekar’s negatives are all from the Lick Observatory, a research facility for the University of California located on the summit of Mount Hamilton just east of San Jose, CA. The book pages were sensitized with potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate – the basic ingredients of any cyanotype — and then exposed from dusk to dawn, contact printed using UV light emanating from the moon. The results are complex, compelling, and poetic, using the tools of science to express more arcane and spiritual philosophies about an astral body that has captivated our imaginations and influenced the world’s civilizations throughout recorded history.
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The mixing of East and West is an important part of Ebtekar’s vision. Paging through Thirty-six Views of the Moon, there are many familiar names — Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, Robert Heinlein and Toni Morrison among them — as well as pages from books printed in Arabic, Sufi poetry by Rumi and Farid Ud-Din Attar. Thirty-six Views of the Moon also includes several essays, further clarifying this intention to mix the philosophies of East and West, with contributions by Alexander Nemerov, most well-known for his biography of Helen Frankenthaler, Fierce Poise; Kim Beil, a savvy art historian at Stanford University interested in vernacular and popular photography; and Ladan Akbarnia, curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at The San Diego Museum of art. Like many books published by Radius, Thirty-six Views of the Moon includes a bibliography, a surprising delight because with it you can see how the artist developed an approach to his work, making it a sustained investigation that involves much more than just the camera for understanding the subject. Here, Ebtekar references studies of Persian architecture, Sufi philosophers, Japanese haiku, Sun Ra, Malcolm X, and classic American science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin. Traces of all these things are in his pictures, simple cyanotypes that somewhat crudely describe the shape and surface of the moon (it can be a clumsy process, cyanotype).
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The photographs in Thirty-six Views of the Moon were originally part of an installation, piecing together a larger image of the moon from the small contact prints, but are presented in the book one at a time. In seeing them this way, we can relish the lovely idiosyncrasies and characteristics unique to cyanotypes and other hand-coated processes; made with superlative production values — like all Radius books — at times you can see the light-sensitive salts mixing with the paper fibers (one of my favorite parts of alternative process photography is that image lies in the paper, not on it) as well as flaws from hand-coating and small stains from processing. This intimacy is essential for really understanding Ebtekar’s photographs, which create a story with nuanced layers of inquiry; using negatives of the moon produced at a 21st century astrophysics laboratory, printed on pages of rich poetry and fanciful prose, somehow evoking both physics and mysticism by exposing them to moonlight, Ebtekar still manages to make something autobiographical, perhaps seen in a subtle, careful sensibility I find inherit to well-crafted, handmade photographs.
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