Frozen Sky

The Moon doesn't cooperate with photographers. Expose for the clouds and the Moon blows out — a featureless white disc. Expose for the Moon and everything else goes dark. Susan Gunn solved this the honest way: two separate single exposures from the same session, combined into one image that shows both the sky and the Moon exactly as they actually were that night.

The result is a full Moon so detailed you can trace individual craters, surrounded by dark churning clouds that seem to have stopped mid-motion around it. The sky looks frozen — not in the artificial sense, but in the way a great photograph freezes something true. This is what that night actually looked like to someone standing beneath it.

Frozen Sky is a departure from Susan's signature single-exposure work — and one of the most striking prints in the collection because of it.