At the open balcony door: a morning threshold, a passage. The intimate interior is still close to the body, while the sky already enters the gaze. Carried outward with the gaze, led into openness through vision, our most far-reaching sense. A sense of orientation, an anticipation of the day, wants to form.

Interruption.

28 May. The sky is already crossed by persistent stripes in several directions, and it feels like an intimate impact on the morning privacy of this first relation to the sky. Although a kind of blue remains perceptible as colour, undisturbed deep-blue visibility is no longer accessible, and the free expanse of the sky is obstructed.

The photographs follow this condition across the sky-field, from northeast to east and west, where the same persistence appeared in different directions throughout the day.

Gaston Bachelard’s “intimate immensity” helps to name the experiential depth that undisturbed deep-blue visibility and the sky in its natural appearance can hold — and what changes when this quality is anthropogenically altered. Deep-blue visibility is not experienced merely as a distant expanse outside the body. Its openness can become intimate, widening the lived interior of experience. At the balcony door, interior closeness and atmospheric distance meet.

On this morning, however, the movement toward intimate immensity is interrupted. The sky is no longer encountered as an undisturbed natural expanse. Anthropogenic presence is already inscribed into the morning intimacy of the first gaze, obstructing the possibility of entering the sky’s immensity as an undisturbed lived quality.

The morning interruption carried on through the day. In the following images, the same persistence remains present until evening, reaching into another intimate moment of sky experience: the private gaze toward sunset and afterglow, where the gaze could naturally follow the day into quiet distance.