the light audit
how high the sun stood, at every encounter
Every photograph in the collection carries the moment it was taken and the place it was taken from. Between them they fix a third thing the museum never recorded deliberately: the position of the sun. For each of the 8,447 located, timestamped works the museum has computed the sun's elevation — its height above or below the horizon, in degrees, corrected for the bending of light through the atmosphere. The result is an audit of the light the practice was working in, assembled from evidence the archive was already holding.
the bands
the collection distributed by the light it was found in
findings
entered in the register, and certified
On the museum's working light. The median encounter was made with the sun 34.8° above the horizon — mid-morning or mid-afternoon light, in most latitudes. The practice, which has never scheduled itself, has arrived at a habit anyway.
On darkness. 901 works — one in nine — were found after sunset, and 489 of them under a sun more than eighteen degrees below the horizon, which is to say in the dark, with no astronomical excuse. The committee notes that the museum does not stop noticing when the light does.
On the deepest darkness. The museum's darkest accession was made with the sun 78.8° beneath the horizon — four minutes past midnight, in Australia, in July, with the sun as nearly underfoot as the collection has managed. The committee has ruled the hour immaterial to the work.
On the brightest. The opposite record stands in Thailand in August, the sun within two degrees of vertical (88.2°) at 12:28 in the afternoon — very nearly no shadow at all, which the museum regards as its own kind of difficulty.
On the midnight sun. 65 works were encountered with the sun above the horizon between ten at night and four in the morning. All of them are in Norway. The Oslo Annex's claim to have never been seen in the dark is upheld, and extended: at the museum's higher latitudes there was, for a season, no dark to be seen in.
On the nocturnal countries. The collection's median sun elevation varies by nation more than the museum expected. China is the museum's only country with a median below the horizon (−3.9°) — the entire national holding was gathered, in effect, in the evening. Singapore follows at 10.5°, which the committee attributes to the annex's verticality and to the fact that lifts do not have weather. At the other end, Thailand (50.3°) and Poland (50.2°) were found almost entirely under a high sun.
On method. Elevations were computed from the coordinates recorded by the camera and the true UTC instant of each exposure, taken from the GPS clock where the photograph carries one and from the timezone offset written by the device otherwise. No work was revisited, remeasured, or relit. The sun's position was not observed; it was recovered.
The museum does not choose its light, and never adds any. Axiom 3 forbids the practitioner to touch, alter, clean, rearrange — or light — the 8 or its surroundings, so every work in the collection was photographed under whatever illumination happened to be falling on it at the moment of encounter: the sun at the elevations recorded above, or a streetlamp, a shop window, a passing headlight, the moon. The archive records the consequence. The committee, invited to set a preferred elevation for future fieldwork, has declined, observing that the practice has managed for two and a half years without one.