SOLAR ECLIPSES (Special edition)
Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico’s project Solar Eclipses is made up of a collection of collages created using images of solar eclipses found in the New York Public Library Picture Collection. She creates these collages by placing the images on a scanner and arranging them to get as many as possible into each copy. This book is a collection of photocopies of those original images created on the library scanner. Umbrico’s approach to the project mediates on the duality between physical experience and the digitising of images printed on paper. The process of searching through the library’s collection today seems absurd in light of the facility and accessibility brought by the digital internet age, thus as the collection is gradually digitised, the material form of paper - a reflective medium requiring an external light source to be seen, and that often represents light in the image it supports - is now seen depicted online via the medium of the screen. Reflective paper becomes projective light. Umbrico chooses to focus on the solar eclipse at the library as the epitome of this relationship between the reflective and projective. The dynamic of the eclipse is the negation of natural light with that whose visibility is dependent on it. Thus her process reflects the same fascination with the photocopier itself as an “eclipser”:  its light escapes around the paper it scans, creating the densest black – an inverted eclipse. White becomes light, and light becomes black.