With the appearance of dramatic seascapes at twilight, the three photographs in the Waves series were in fact shot in the studio, based on a tentative exploration of two generic modalities across the twilight spectrum in a seascape horizon. The experiment was triggered by an image search on Google, with the aim of comparing Dead Sea landscapes during both sunrise and sunset, as seen from either side of the Israeli-Jordanian border. As it turns out, the results returned by the search engine showed great similarities, whether taken from the Eastern or Western Bank.
Working in the studio, Mittwoch used rolled up sheets of corrugated paper as mockups for the stretches of sea, land and sky, putting in place the base for a composition that repeats throughout the images in the series. Stacked from top to bottom, the rolled up sheets were then projected with artificial lighting meant to simulate, as though in a time lapse, the three lighting conditions of a nocturnal seascape, from sundown to sunset or the other way around, depending on the viewer’s hypothetical standpoint.
A fixed camera, set to Live View mode, was positioned to face the mockup set, allowing the artist to control and manipulate the image in real time. Staged in the studio, this apparatus evokes the copying method known as camera lucida, which predated photography, but just as much the photographic devices of today, where the eye is fixated on the screen rather than directly at the subject matter.
Both these devices imply a distancing of the viewer from the subject matter they regard. However, the clichéd image of twilight in itself – which Mittwoch convincingly fabricates in the studio – is likewise more the product of optical obfuscation than a tangible reality accessible to the eye. As the sun appears to hit the horizon, it is, in fact, no longer visible; all we see is its after-image as projected unto the atmosphere – the only time when we can glimpse it without having to avert our eyes.