Sunspot

Sunspot (2023) shows two lives and two observatories, one in Los Angeles, one in Tokyo. Using archival imagery, the film tells the tale of two sunspot observers both making drawings of the same sun on the day the Hiroshima bomb killed 100,000 people on August 6th, 1945. The film reflects on the forms and uses of light, from the light reflecting in a mirror to look at the sun and into space, the white hollow light of the bomb, and the light shone through the old film footage to create the image we see now. The huge wildfire that threatened Los Angeles’ Mount Wilson Observatory becomes a mirror of the huge clouds and destruction from the atomic bomb.

Footage from The Huntington Library in California shows Joseph Hiscox at work at Mount Wilson Observatory. He made solar observation drawings, while many of his colleagues would have been developing the atomic bombs that would eventually be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Meanwhile footage from the National Astronomical Observatory shows Yukiaki Tanaka, who worked in the solar physics division at the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory. A skilled artist, deaf from a young age, he was hired to make solar observations. He worked daily throughout the war in the camouflaged Observation Dome, oblivious to the destruction surrounding him, at risk from the bombing and deadly fires that overtook the city.

Sunspot was part of Atomic Light, David Blandy’s most ambitious project to date, featuring four newly commissioned films, it builds upon his continued interest in history, the legacy of empire and the climate crisis.

Commissioned by John Hansard Gallery in partnership with Towner, Eastbourne & Supported by Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust