Mark
Chen

Pilgrimage of Light

We take the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second as an instantaneous medium that represents reality. When we look out into the universe, however, the speed of light is anything but instantaneous. For example, when the light of a galaxy 85 million light years away started its journey to us, the granite of Half Dome, Yosemite was forming underground from cooling magma.

I want to visualize this profound mystery of our natural history by juxtaposing subjects in heaven and on Earth, matching the length of time for the image of the former to travel to us, and the formation of the latter to shape as today. Forgoing today's digital tools, I choose to visit the terrestrial sites, bringing with me a projector and a NASA archive, physically projecting the stars onto the landscapes while photographing. These celestial and terrestrial wonders, always coexisted and never were together, until I united them on my Pilgrimage of Light.