MARGET
LONG
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
MARGET
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
Mirage Viewing Station, 2014
In The Pencil of Nature (1844), William Henry Fox Talbot, one of photography’s inventors, described his new process as “photogenic drawing.” Long considers mirages to be a kind of pencil of nature in their own right—images that use the earth, the air, and the sun to write themselves into the landscape.
The Mirage Viewing Station bypassed the human-made camera, tapping instead into the mirage’s potential as a continuous, live imaging event. It functioned as a public site for refractive viewing—a place for observation and conversation about vision, desire, and imagination. Visitors watched the horizon shift and ripple in real time, experiencing the atmosphere itself as an image-making medium.
A printed text, The Mirage Report, was available to viewers at the site, offering reflections on the science and poetics of mirages.
Mirage Viewing Station was realized with the support of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.