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James Benning's Ten Skies employs a basic structure: ten skies, ten minutes per sky-each a stationary viewpoint, no camera movement, no voice-over. Whatever happens-the motion of clouds, smoke, light, shifting colors, the occasional bird-happens in the frame. It's potentially seductive, as meditative as the real thing. But there's more: a soundtrack of various sounds and noises, an excess that haunts and complicates the ethereal image, that tugs at us, not quite pulling us back but acting as a reminder of something, a guilty memory. The sound, in effect, reinstates the horizon in images that otherwise verge on kinetic abstraction. It also introduces a politics into a potentially sealed-off aesthetic zone.
Benning's skies have a history steeped in the particular dance of technology and light that characterized nineteenth-century photography. The sky was a problem for early photographers. Inevitably at variance, the ground and sky in any landscape required different exposures. Expose for the ground and the sky became a washed-out void; expose for the sky and the ground became a vast shadow. It's a lesson beginners are still obliged to learn. The limitations of early film emulsions thus interfered with the ostensible realism of the image. The landscape on the photographic plate was half a landscape. In a few instances it resulted in some striking effects. The blown-out skies of Timothy O'Sullivan, for instance, suggest a variant of the sublime, not so much threatening as blank and pitiless (fig. 1).
An early special effect sometimes came to the rescue. Combination prints allowed the photographer to create what appeared to be more realistic landscapes-suddenly clouds were supported by equally detailed grounds, harmonized to resemble actual scenes or at least the effects that had long been the province of the painted landscape. The discovery made it possible to displace individual elements of a landscape and to reassemble them in various combinations. Yet even in instances that attempted to remain true to a particular scene, a discrepancy was inevitable. The requirement that a photographer needed to make two images of the same scene meant that a temporal disjunction, an interval, however minute, was built into the process. Theoretically this would only be obvious in instances where light changed suddenly and dramatically, but in all instances it haunted the photo,...