ALA Ebtekar: Thirty-Six Views of the Moon (Hardcover)

Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by...

-- Omar Khayyam, 11th-century mathematician and poet

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. The work takes its cue from Omar Khayyam's poem, eventually producing a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. This project challenges viewers to imagine the the moon looking at us, seeing ourselves as the objects of the moon's billion-year gaze.

There are four unique editions to the work, each produced under the moonlight of a season (i.e. winter, spring, etc.), and each with its own unique bibliography. The artist's proof is the only edition made with moonlight from all four seasons over the span of one year.