Cloud Album

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Department of Defense, USA, “Atom Bomb Test,” 1946

colour-tinted gelatin silver print (courtesy the Archive of Modern Conflict)

Cloud Album, on view at the Polygon Gallery until May 1, features an extensive catalogue of archival photographic imagery that ponders our fixation with the sky. The exhibition is curated by Luce Lebart and Timothy Prus, of the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict, an organization founded in 1991 originally as a photographic archive dedicated to war and conflict. It now actively preserves and collects vernacular photos, artifacts and ephemera of lost and forgotten stories. By nature, there is nothing quite as ephemeral as a cloud, yet this exhibition presents a very solid collection of more than 250 historical images of the sky and its contents. 

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Gustave Le Gray, “The Brig, Normandy, France,” 1858

albumen print (courtesy the Archive of Modern Conflict)

Cloud Album has been percolating over the last 25 years as Prus began collecting cloud photography in earnest, and Lebart began writing about clouds during her graduate studies. There is an easy lightness to their curation, which does not dwell on the philosophy or meaning the sky may hold, but instead offers restraint, simply showing what they have gathered and demonstrating changes to photographic and meteorological technologies over time. The show takes its title from Belgian meteorologist Jean Vincent’s 1894 scientific collection, Cloud Album, a record scientific in its explorations but formed in the style of a family album, with contributions from both hobbyists and experts in the field. 

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Anonymous, “WWII Bomb raid on Moosbierbaum oil refinery,” no date

silver gelatin print (courtesy the Archive of Modern Conflict)

The show poses a nice tension between the material and the immaterial. On one hand, the objects on view aim to seize upon some unnameable quality of feeling we have when viewing the sky. On the other hand, the archive speaks to the thingness of its collection. From cloud studies on paper rendered by early 19th-century English landscape painter John Constable, to small framed personal photos, and images of nuclear and environmental crisis, the show manages a materiality more sentimental than monumental. Lebart remarks that images of the sky are, in fact, banal, noting how photos of sunsets are shared over and over on social media, but somehow continue to give pleasure. 

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Ferdinand Quénisset, “Cumulo-Nimbus, Juvisy, France,” 1903

gelatin silver print (courtesy the Archive of Modern Conflict)

Early photographic practices could not capture the exact image of clouds because of necessarily long exposure times. This technological limitation made photography an unreliable medium for the sky. Clouds are very dynamic masses, not only heaving with water droplets, but also alive with an almost unintelligible movement – either too slow or too swift to be noticed by most eyes. For this reason, selections from the 1896 edition of the International Cloud Atlas show photographic studies accompanied by more precise diagrammatic drawings. The Constable skyscapes that open the show seem more accurate, both in feeling and appearance, than photographs from the same period. 

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Organisation for the Defense Against Aircrafts, Paris, “Verdier device beginning to release smoke (1 minute after opening the taps),” 1914-1918

gelatin silver print, album (courtesy the Archive of Modern Conflict)

The best-in-show for me is a film, The Movement of Clouds, made in the 1920s by the late Japanese physicist Masanao Abe. Abe built an observatory to investigate air currents across Mount Fuji, visualizing them by suturing moving image, still photography, drawing and stereoscopy of the mountain over a 15-year period. The film is a turbulent record, capturing the force of air by following the movement of clouds. The clouds lend unique visibility to movements that would otherwise be hard to see. It’s a piece that demonstrates the sky’s drama. ■

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