c h r i s t o p h e r r i l e y
photography projects
Just twelve men in our planet's entire four thousand six hundred million year history have stood on another world and looked back at the Earth. The number of times that life has emerged in our entire galaxy and evolved to the point where it can leave its home planet to visit another one is probably very very small. The men in these photographs achieved something of galactic significance. An event as significant perhaps as the emergence of life itself.
For more than 10 years I have been photographing doors and doorways I've encountered on my travels around the world. The doorway represents a gateway into an inner space and back out into the world beyond - through which countless souls have passed during the lifetime of the building.
Across the sky on any day thousands of tonnes of water hang - suspended in vapours - sometimes transparent - sometimes in opaque mists of immense proportions - sculptured by unseen winds and thermals and enhanced by sunlight. From the privileged vantage point of an aircraft window or the ground below I have always tried to photograph them.
The view of one planet from another is filled with possibilities. These naked eye views of our neighbouring worlds hold all the romance of imagined vistas and cloudscapes which await a visiting explorer. Somehow, set in the context of a night sky, above an Earthly view define our place more clearly in the solar system.
The engineering miracle of robotic exploration has now also given us a unique chance to look back at the Earth as an equally anonymous, tiny dot as viewed from these other worlds.
In celebration of a distant relative of mine R.J. Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire, this project is dedicated to his iconic aircraft. Mitchell died in 1937, only twelve months after the Spitfire took to the skies and three years before the Battle of Britain which made his beautiful machine so famous.
