Bryant Austin: Solar Transit

Bryant Austin: Solar Transit

In his ongoing series, Solar Transit, Bryant Austin makes photographs that reveal the sun’s surface in vivid detail while documenting its apparent transit across the California landscape. His process is complex and often requires the use of three separate telescopes equipped with infrared cameras, and a monochrome video camera with scientific lens filters. Working throughout California, but with an affinity for the Sierra Nevada, Austin backpacks his equipment into remote areas of Yosemite National Park to capture fleeting interactions between the sun and the topography of the landscape that occur only during specific times of the year. Seen through the lens of his telescopes, the sun’s presence is heightened and its connection with the landscape becomes tangible—offering us a poignant reminder of our place in the universe, and of a reality that operates on a much larger timescale.

Bryant Austin (b.1969) is an artist and photographer based in Carmel, California. His photographs have been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues in the U.S. and abroad including the Monterey Museum of Art; the USA Gallery at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, Australia; and the Tamada Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include the Datz Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; and photo-eye Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bryant’s photographs have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, WIRED Magazine, and The Huffington Post, among others. His first monograph, Beautiful Whale, was released in 2013 by Abrams Books.

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