Sky Index
Sky Index is a durational photographic practice structured around a single, repeated act: one photograph of the sky made each day from wherever I stand, precisely tagged with location, date, and exact time.
Accumulated over months and years, the images form an evolving index of color, place, and atmosphere, registering time through gradual shifts in light rather than through event or narrative.
The work is in direct conversation with Roman Opalka’s lifelong commitment to marking time through accumulation. Opalka’s practice demonstrates how repetition, when sustained over a lifetime, becomes both measure and content. Sky Index shares this investment in duration and discipline, but replaces numerical progression with chromatic change. Where Opalka counted forward, Sky Index observes laterally, tracking time as it moves through light, weather, and geography. In both practices, meaning is not produced by any single unit but by the persistence of the act itself and the viewer’s encounter with its scale.
The project also engages the chromatic attentiveness of Byron Kim’s Sunday Paintings. Kim’s work isolates color as a record of lived time, linking abstraction to routine and social context. Sky Index extends this logic into the sky as a shared, external color field, one that is both universally visible and geographically specific. Like Kim’s paintings, the images resist hierarchy or climax, allowing tonal variation to accumulate into a visual record that is experiential rather than symbolic. Color becomes a factual register of presence rather than an expressive gesture.
Each image in Sky Index is made without filters or manipulation, holding only the conditions of that moment: the sky overhead, the coordinates beneath my feet, and the light passing between. The rules are fixed and simple, and deviation is avoided. This constraint is central to the work, ensuring that attention is placed on consistency, return, and observation rather than authorship or interpretation. The labor of showing up daily is integral to the project's meaning.
This work is first realized on Instagram, a platform typically structured around speed, novelty, and disposability. Sky Index deliberately works against those conditions by adopting a fixed format and a daily rhythm that privileges accumulation over immediacy. Rather than using the platform to circulate content, the project uses Instagram’s linear feed as a temporal structure, where repetition slows attention, scrolling becomes a way of reading duration, and daily posting registers as sustained labor instead of constant production.
Beyond its digital life, Sky Index is designed for translation into physical form through large-scale pigment panels, chronological grids, and immersive installations. These material iterations allow the accumulated record to be experienced spatially, emphasizing density, sequence, and duration. On my website, the project expands into a living map and monthly color strips that connect image, geography, and tonal trajectory, making the archive's structure legible across time and place.
Taken as a whole, Sky Index is a study of light, duration, and sustained attention. It approaches time as something that is marked through daily commitment rather than exceptional moments, and treats observation as an ongoing practice. The work records presence one day at a time, allowing time to appear slowly, through accumulation.
