Ala Ebtekar: Thirty-Six Views of the Moon

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures made with book pages from texts referencing the night sky spanning the last ten centuries.

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

Taking his cue from Omar Khayyam’s poem, Ebtekar produces a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. In his process, 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.
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