Cyanotype Photography - Dan (Hendrickson) Takes Pictures

About Cosmologica

Cosmologica documents a fictional space exploration mission using the 19th-century printing technique known as cyanotype. The series uses photographs of real-world spaceships, spaceports, airships, dust clouds, and light to tell the story of an explorer’s journey across the cosmos to a new planet.

The photographer behind this series is unable to fly his own deep space mission. Instead he seeks the virtues of exploration through this fictional mission with a meditation on our place in the cosmos, and an introspection on our future.

The first half of the series centers on the mystery and intrigue of the universe as the explorer photographs deep space for the first time. The stellar nurseries, comets, star clusters, and other phenomena depicted in this series may look like they come from the Hubble Space Telescope, but were actually re-contextualized images from our own world. These faux views from space serve as a visual reminder that we are in fact living in a vast and dramatic cosmos made of common constituents.

Following this initial deep space survey, the explorer unexpectedly spots a potentially habitable planet in an otherwise unremarkable star system. To take a closer look, the explorer’s spaceship touches down on the planet at what appears to be a purpose-built desert spaceport.

Upon landing, the explorer finds hundreds of abandoned airships and artifacts. Clearly this planet once hosted a sky faring civilization, but where now are the individuals who built these ships? Were they wiped out in a mass extinction event? Did they leave the planet behind? All of these questions are jumping-off points as the viewer peers through a photographic medium from the 1800s.