Ala Ebtekar’s new book Thirty-Six Views of the Moon published by Radius Books.
Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures. Ebtekar uses book pages from texts referencing the moon and night sky spanning the last ten centuries, leaving the sheets outside in the moonlight from dusk until dawn.
The artist works with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive. Then, Ebtekar exposes the pages overnight in the UV-light emitted by the moon, producing a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. This project challenges viewers to imagine the moon looking at us, seeing ourselves as the objects of the moon’s billion-year gaze.
Texts by Alexander Nemerov, Kim Beil, and Ladan Akbarnia
For more information and to pre-order the book click here
