Lumière
Color inkjet print from handmade pinhole camera positive, dimensions variable, 2024

This image is the result of one of the experiments I attached to a stratospheric balloon at Esrange Space Center, Kiruna, Sweden, in September 2023. I made a pinhole camera out of an empty 9cm square plastic 16mm film box. I named the camera Lumière, after the French brothers who invented the first film camera in the 19th century. The camera takes a long exposure and tracks the rays of the sun. I speculate that the chaotic lines are made when the balloon was ascending in Sweden and descending in Finland and the straighter lines are imprints of the sun’s rays when the balloon was floating for 4 hours at a height of 27.2km above the earth.