Myths, stories, and well-documented cases indicate that prolonged, direct exposure to the sunlight can result in permanent damage to the retina and even blindness. Dangers to our health notwithstanding, the sunlight is so blinding that confronting it would only make the object one is trying to capture – the sun itself — dissolve before one’s very eyes. This is due to the eyes’ vulnerability to light, of course; but it is tempting to think that it is the act of looking that is responsible for the uncertain status of the sun as a tangible object with its own shape and volume. One wonders whether it is our gaze that, like a laser beam, pulverizes the sun, turning into pure light.
Whether one chooses the scientific or the more poetic interpretation of the phenomenon, it is a fact that the sun – our ultimate light source – is experienced only indirectly as glow, a light mantle that both illuminates and defines the spaces and objects that surround us. One is assured of its shape and volume, its very existence as a concrete, spatially definable entity, only by imagining or at most catching a glimpse of it through the corner of one’s eye. Much easier, as Yukari Edamitsu’s photographs so playfully illustrate, to catch the sun with one’s hands. The hand is both a frame and a shield, at once hiding and helping define the sun’s shape. In her brilliantly “edited” sequence, the sun is seen running through one’s fingers, like a tiny billiard ball in the hands of a magician. Here the illusion of solidity, the impression of someone playing with a luminous ball, is almost complete. The size of this mysterious object is, of course, simply a function of the camera eye’s distance from the sun. But in so depicting it, Edamitsu cleverly flattens space and thus erases that very distance. Held as it is in the palm of one’s hand, the sun, and no longer merely its light, is at last turned into a tangible presence.