Stephanie O’Connor - All Stars Stand Close in Summer Air

The 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, begins with Dorothy returning to her aunt and uncle’s Kansas farm after their neighbour hits her dog for chasing her cat. The entire sequence before the tornado miraculously transports the young girl to Oz is sepia coloured, illustrating the farm and its surroundings as one of the bleakest representations of home and homeland in cinema. When Dorothy awakes in Oz, however, she enters the magic of the Technicolor world. The shift from monochrome to colour is a powerful visual technique that effectively carries the viewer away in the fairy tale space. The first few seconds are full of awe, almost overwhelming. Suddenly, one sees more, and therefore feels more. Looking at All Stars Stand Close in Summer Air reminded me of that exhilarating awareness of experiencing vision at its full potential.

Looking at All Stars Stand Close in Summer Air reminded me of the exhilarating awareness of experiencing vision at its full potential.

For this series, Stephanie O’Connor returns to Aotearoa New Zealand after five years in Berlin, Germany, where she photographs her homeland and her family. Back in the grey capital, she reworks the images to augment their vibrancy. Some obtain a soft glow in the process, while others are sunk into inky shadows. The place still feels real, as real as vivid dreaming, but under the artist’s control, these photographs seem to be captured mid-transformation, visualising the brain rewriting sensation into memory. This publication is a beautiful object that carries this concept throughout, from the title that shimmers blue on a plain coral background and the absorbing cover, to the engaging rhythm of photographs of different sizes and the playfulness of Frances Libeau’s short poems. The book is ‘butterflied’ – made up of two parts handbound together by book designer Tina De Soutis, a hint at two halves making up a whole, although it’s not entirely clear what these are. If we study the subject, the first half contains more pictures of water, while the second half is focused on the land, with a significant number of close-ups of plants. Despite the human closeness to the land, the alien chromatic here makes it feel as foreign as the water. The entire landscape is uncharted territory, and O’Connor doesn’t position herself as a local guide, but as a mesmerised explorer.

The most familiar images are those of fiery and golden sunset clouds. Yet in this series, the spectacle of the sunset makes a tame impression. Not benefitting from the otherworldly quality of the other photographs in the book, the sunset cannot escape its romantic connotations and therefore leaves little space to wonder. The book treads a fine line here; its title comes from Country Summer, an intricate poem by Léonie Adams about the simple, but idyllic summer on the farm, which hints at romantic themes such as marvelling at the natural world and idealising the pastoral life. And yet O’Connor manages to avoid the sentimentality of the return to the homeland. If anything, with their intense hues and dramatic mood, her photographs resemble expressionist paintings, such as the Flowering Trees of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1909) or Hermann Max Pechstein’s Waldweg (1927).

As an emigrant myself, I recognise the sense of ‘uncanny newness to the familiar’ the artist speaks about in the beginning of the book. Whenever I go home, I’m overly sensitive to my surroundings. I can see my parents’ new wrinkles; I can hear sounds I haven’t paid attention to before, like the bats in the park at night; or can stand in awe at the thousands of crows flying above the city in the evening. My annual visits offer me a sensorial stimulation that I hadn’t been able to tap into when I was living there. When I’m back in London, recollecting these sensations, they become amplified in rosy retrospection – the forest is greener, the air warmer, the peaches sweeter.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – *Flowering Trees,* 1909

I believe O’Connor’s photographs capture nostalgia in-the-making, immediate encounters and occurrences gradually sedimenting into memories. The most recent neuroscience of nostalgia has shown that this is a complex emotion, involving aspects of self-reflection, autobiographical memory, emotion regulation, and a sense of reward. Nostalgia can release dopamine in the brain, helping us to feel good, but more importantly, to create a sense of belonging. However, like any other dopamine stimulator, we need a stronger dose every time we’re looking to re-live the impossible pleasure of being home. O’Connor’s process of reworking the images, and through them, her own memories, leans into this biological desire for progressive stimulation.

And afterall, what does an artist do if not carefully manipulating the viewer’s dopamine levels? In the case of photobooks, the artist presumably wants the viewer to keep turning the page, so they need to be exposed to the right amount of gradual excitement. More often than not, O’Connor’s book does just that – I enjoyed the size, slightly smaller than A4, and the play between the little and large images. I found, however, that the photographs that occupied a full spread were not best served by this decision; the binding always interrupts the flatness of the photograph and sometimes the mesmerising gradients are not rendered at their full potential. I was particularly disappointed to see the symmetrical, dark blue layered landscape of forest, sea and sky shown on an entire spread. The brightness of the sun, hidden behind a thick cover of clouds, is reflected in the water in the centre of this atmospheric image, but this is also where the pages are joined together, interrupting the sublime mystery of the photographic illusion. In comparison, Albarrán Cabrera’s Remembering the Future, a book similar in tone, embraces the smaller photograph, to no loss of attention from the viewer. If anything, a humbler size can better concentrate colours, gradients and sharpness. Another aspect that slightly distracts from the photographs is the satin quality of the paper, which although has delivered astonishing colours, is at times too shiny for the darker areas of the images.

O’Connor’s masterful manipulation of light and colour transforms familiar landscapes into vibrant dreamscapes, mirroring the heightened sensory experience of returning home after an extended absence.

Overall, All Stars Stand Close in Summer Air transcends the homecoming narrative, meditating instead on the deeply personal visual process of refining events and feelings into memories. O’Connor’s masterful manipulation of light and colour transforms familiar landscapes into vibrant dreamscapes, mirroring the heightened sensory experience of returning home after an extended absence. Many of the images in the book linger, much like the magical Technicolor land of Oz. I’ve often wondered why Dorothy returns to her sepia home, and I to the grey London. Perhaps true colour is what we see with the mind’s eye.