The first credited photograph by Niépce contains the sky. There was no way around it. No electric lights, candle light couldn't produce the lights to produce the earliest photographs. Even cyanotype photograms contained this space. It would be shortsighted to say it became an essential element to produce “light drawings”–it was always essential. You needed the open sky to produce the necessary effects of a camera obscura, or camera Lucida. The sky is still both an element and subject of photography. This show displays every image submitted around the theme of the Sky. From JW Turner-esque landscapes, to photographs of the West, images of the sky have shaped our aspirations to proliferation of sunset imagery on Instagram, making the changing sky another over-innodated, banal image. What forms our thoughts of the sky? How are images of the sky reflexive? What is your best image of the sky? In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing describes an approach to contemporary capitalist life as a “contamination”. That everything is affecting each other, whether productive or intentional or not. When I first saw Katerina Voegtle’s image for the show I was perplexed. A man, stretching his leg in Shanghai- cool gear accented by Fuiyue shoes. Then, there it was. Underneath the loosely- translated “Constantly Battling Time” headline: the sky. The sky is unescapable. In a memoir about cave-diving the writer describes the lack of orientation from not having the sky. Amateur pilots can face the disorientation. The sky is still present in its absence, air, necessity, space, water. Even Voegtle’s portrait the red canvas becomes sky-like in its encompassing background. All of these are featured from the eeriness of Peter Hoffman’s to the awe of Evan Perkins’s long exposure, and the black of Ryan Parker’s. The feelings of these images are enhanced by notes and writings like the included by Alissa Palmer. She says “A reflection is not merely a mirror image, but a glitch unveiling the literal,” and indeed, these photos reveal the way reflections and expanses like the sky can impose an affect on us. As ubiquitous as the sky is in these photos, after seeing 50, it inherently becomes about the other information included. Why were these things included? I think all this information adds to our relationship to the sky. It has an immense power to affect us. The difference between a sunny day and grey day can set the tone and change a life work.