You spend the whole trip trying to fit the sky into a frame. And then one night you turn the camera around, and the only thing worth photographing is how small a person looks standing under it.
This isn’t a place. It’s a feeling that turned up in the same corner of frame after frame, on different coasts, in different years: a person, a parked car, a lit window — some small warm human thing, and a sky above it doing something enormous and completely indifferent.
I
Head all the way back.
a person, for scalethe only pose that fits
01The only gesture that fits.
There are two gestures, and everyone makes them in the same order. First the arms fly up — wide, involuntary, half signal and half surrender. Then they come down, the head tips all the way back, and you go quiet. The first one is for whoever might be watching. The second is what a body does when the thing it’s looking at is too big to hold in the eyes all at once.
Put a person at the bottom of the frame and the sky stops being a screensaver. Suddenly there’s scale — a single dark shape for the light to be enormous next to.
It’s what a body does when the thing it’s looking at is too big to hold in the eyes.
Alone on the ice, a single figure and a whole sky. No sense of scale until you notice the person is the size of a comma at the bottom of the page.
That comma is the whole point.
02One person, the size of a comma.
II
Then everyone goes inside.
cabins · guesthouses · lit windowssmall, warm, human
03One house, lit from the inside. Nobody out.
Nobody watches the aurora for as long as they mean to. It’s cold in a way that gets into decisions, and eventually everyone retreats to the small warm box they arrived in — a guesthouse room with the radiator ticking, a rented rorbu with one lit window, a tour coach with the heater running. The sky keeps going without an audience.
Those little human lights are the most honest thing in any of these pictures. They admit the truth the wide shots leave out: that mostly, we watch the greatest show on the planet for a few minutes, get cold, and go inside.
04One lit window, a hundred-kilometre sky.
05A busload of strangers, somewhere out in the dark.
And still they come. The white coach outside the guesthouse is the tell: somewhere out in the dark, a busload of strangers who crossed an ocean for the chance of this, heads tipped back in a gravel car park. Tomorrow night it will be a different coach, a different busload, the same sky.
The sky doesn’t need an audience. The audience comes anyway.
III
How small, exactly.
humbling, for the wrong reasonnothing to do but look
06Too big to hold in the eyes all at once.
The word people reach for is “humbling,” and it’s the right word for the wrong reason. It isn’t that the sky makes you feel unimportant. It’s that, for a few minutes, being unimportant stops feeling like a problem — you’re a small warm thing on a cooling rock, watching charged particles hit the air a hundred kilometres up, and there is nothing you are supposed to do about it except look.
That’s the picture worth keeping. Not the sky on its own — the sky, and something the size of a person underneath it, holding still.
A small warm thing on a cooling rock, watching.
The sky is the same everywhere. Only we change size.
Go back through any set of aurora photographs and the good ones almost always have a person in them, or the trace of one — a parked coach, a light in a hand, a lit window. The sky is the same everywhere. What changes, frame to frame, is how small we agreed to look underneath it.
The full roll
Photo gallery
12 frames · across the trips tap a frame to open
Under It · Words & photographs · Yiğit Yüksel · Norway · Iceland · Sweden
