On the first image in Deep Space

If you stand in front of this image at print size, the first thing you might do is look for a planet name. The bright form on the left has the shape of a globe. The field behind it reads, almost without question, as a starscape — distant, very dark, scattered with light. The print is eighty centimetres wide. The image was made in a room the size of a kitchen. The "planet" is a glass sphere about the size of a small coin. Behind it, a sheet of dark paper with fine glitter scattered across the surface. A small LED light sits off to one side, doing the work of distant stars. The camera is on a tripod, with extension tubes between the body and the kit lens. The lens is closer to the sphere than my fingers can comfortably reach. What I'm looking for, when I make a Deep Space image, is the moment the eye stops believing its scale. You can know — you can be told, on the wall label — that the scene is the size of your hand. The eye still won't quite accept it. Something about the way light bends through the small sphere, and the way the points of light scatter in the back, reaches a part of the brain that is older than the explanation. I called the series Deep Space because that is what the images are not. They are surface — a few centimetres from the lens, brightly lit, made in an afternoon. But they pretend to depth. The pretence is the work. This first image is the simplest of the series. There is a single sphere, off to one side, and a single field of stars. There are no satellites, no rings, no second source of light. I made it that way on purpose. I wanted the first image to behave like a thesis statement — to introduce the trick before the rest of the series complicates it. The later images add things. A second light. A coloured filter. Glitter of two sizes, so the field reads as a galaxy with foreground and depth. A second small sphere, behaving like a satellite. But this one is the start. One sphere, one field, one decision. If you stand in front of it long enough, the eye keeps trying to recover the scale. It never quite does. That is the point.