ABSTRACT
In Sean Cubitt's excellent article “The Sound of Sunlight,” he marks the tension between photographic affinity for sunlight and the sun's damage to onlookers' eyes. Sunlight poses an irrefutable attraction and threat, an Icarus-like conundrum wrought upon the eye, in that we want to see even though we know that looking at the sun causes blindness and optical damage. Tracing his history through Crary's Techniques of the Observer, Cubitt describes how “Turner's immersion in sunlight in his canvases of the 1840s contrasts dramatically with its exclusion in the camerae obscurae of Kepler, Newton and Descartes.” 1 While painterly aesthetics can feature sustained portraits of sunlight, early photographic or telescopic devices tempered their fixation on the sun so as to preserve human vision itself. According to Cubitt, “a roster of optical investigators in the early nineteenth century damaged their eyesight permanently through a variety of extreme experiments, including at least one case of gazing into the sun for so long that the result was incurable blindness.” 2 Cubitt summarizes the impossibility of perceiving the sun:
Source of light though it is, the sun itself cannot be seen, cannot be looked at, without loss of sight. Even a brief glimpse produces an image not of the sun but of its retinal afterimage, as the overloaded rods in the retina shut down and allow the cones to take over, giving the effect of the color draining out of vision. 3
