In the poem that serves as the namesake for this sweeping exhibition, the French writer Francis Ponge describes the sun as “the formal and indispensable condition of everything in the world . . . The condition of sight itself.” In his first exhibition as a curator at the museum, Drew Sawyer picks up this charge in order to contemplate all manner of ways in which our source of light and energy both complicates and enables the task of the photographer.

“The Sun Placed in the Abyss” is divided into three sections: the intersecting histories of photography and science; images of the sun itself, or in which solar rays have been used as a medium; and works that picture sunrise and sunset in order to confront the possibilities and limitations of photographic materials. The themes are specific but just expansive enough to bleed into and reinforce one another. Lisa Oppenheim’s 35-mm slideshow The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else, 2006, is made up of appropriated images of sunsets originally posted by US soldiers deployed in Iraq; Wolfgang Tillmans’s oversize color prints in Venus Transit, 2004, picture the planet through his childhood telescope as it rotates––and is dwarfed by––a pale purple sun; stills from Tacita Dean’s 16-mm film The Green Ray, 2001, captures the last fractional ray the sun emits before retreating beyond the curvature of the earth. In these works, natural light performs overlapping and often conflicting functions for the photographer. It behaves destructively by burning through camera lenses and photosensitive paper. It foils and abets the technologies that attempt to catch, describe, and harness it. And, most persuasively, it functions as an agent of the metaphorical, keeping time (as only that bright star can) as our lives advance and recede.

— Carmen Winant