The Ever-Changing Sky

It was 1993 when Boomoon started to make the series, “On the Clouds.” The first image was photographed from a plane somewhere between Indonesia and Korea. However, to the photographer, the precise ground location he is flying over at the time does not really matter. Rather, he releases the shutter when a subtle change occurs in the otherwise almost unvarying view, a crucial moment he cannot miss in order to grasp the sky as ever-changing.

    Boomoon always sees the sky from his eye-level, not from above or below. He always shoots from on board an aircraft. Even when photographing from a fixed viewpoint, as can be done on the ground, slight error is inevitable. When taking images while flying, however, it is almost impossible to come back to exactly the same location. The repetitive phenomenon of steam lifted up by the rising air current, condensing to form clouds and then disappearing. It is in the midst of this rapid change that such a view from the plane is experienced. Yet when a plane is traveling at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the view does not indicate the plane’s enormous speed; in fact, everything looks stationary.

    In this situation, Boomoon captures an image that can never be caught again. Aerial views are not the only thing we cannot see the same again. There are freshwater currents, oceanic currents and other workings of nature that never repeat themselves. So what makes the sky view special?

    The sky is certainly a topos in a poetic sense, but it is different from visually articulated space. As indicated in two other nuances of the word in Japanese, namely “void” and “empty”, the sky is a neutral, unsubstantial space. Only clouds are substantial entities there. We know that the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter more blue light than lights in any other colors. If the sky is defined as the troposphere between the surface of the earth and the stratosphere, it is the boundary that divides the untouched universe from the human domain. And if one takes a photograph of a small section of the sky, the usual compositional forces at play in a painting are absent. Boomoon is aware of this yet dares to take the sky as his theme, one of the most unsubstantial entities. Moreover, his theme is its ever-changing aspect.

    Needless to say, these photographs are man-made art, not natural things. However, these images of the world unaffected by human hands emphatically suggest they are something between nature and art, like the space images photographed by NASA. Boomoon does not present each image as a whole but as a part, because he sees it as something that evokes the whole.