Looking for the Oldest Piece of Light combines research with new, historical, and experimental photographic processes to unlock astronomical connections. With John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype, as its central figure, the project goes on a journey to capture the most distant visible light. As you look at the night sky you are seeing stars as they were, rather than as they are. Photons travel years, decades, and centuries to reach Earth and produce the illusion of their present. As I gaze back in time, ideas of history, photography, and astronomy begin to blend. A lens is a lens, whether telescope or telephoto. My guide is John Herschel, polymath, and astronomer. 

To begin my search, I dove into the shared history of astronomy and photography. As I stood at the curtain of this world, I wondered if I would be able to peek into the other side. I let the research consume my days. I looked for photographs and drawings from the nineteenth century. I looked at Herschel’s notes about space and about trying to understand how cyanotypes stay blue. I talked with him in my head. We both feel young to the universe. I drove up to the Torrance-Barrens dark-sky reserve with my camera. I took a picture of Andromeda. It is the farthest celestial body our eyes can see, and it is visible only in extremely secluded areas, on clear nights, for about half the year. 

As we look 2.5 million years into the past, we see photons as old as our species. Homo sapiens began to walk the Earth at the same time as these light particles originated—a seemingly significant cosmic coincidence. One day Andromeda and our galaxy’s gravity will pull the two together and they will merge. But for now, we can see it only as it was before Homo sapiens were here to observe it. Time seems to be less of a factor here. We know the past and the future. The “present” has become a relative term, and thus my reality is a constructed illusion.

In 1893 the amateur astronomer August Strindberg “discovered” the practice of celestographs. He set out photographic plates under the night’s sky, unfiltered by any sort of lens. Once developed, they seemingly revealed fantastic galactic scenes invisible to the eye. Perhaps blinded by the excitement of his breakthrough, Strindberg sent evidence of his celestographs to the astronomer Camille Flammarion. Flammarion never replied; he was aware that what he was looking at was just a chemical reaction on the plates. But despite the pseudoscience, they remain curious objects.

Andromeda is not the source of the oldest piece of light. In fact, our whole universe is still illuminated by a faint glow from the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background is leftover light from that initial explosion. As the universe expanded, the light waves were stretched into the invisible infrared. Perhaps the celestographs make visible the invisible universe. We have gone past time, and now reality. Photographs are landmarks of the abstract spaces in the universe.