Have you spotted any distant balloons or UFOs recently? For this series of images, we asked four photographers to do what some of us have done more often: look up.
Hell Balarama
When Balarama Heller got married last month in Tepoztlán, Mexico, a town famous for its reports of UFO sightings, one night he noticed a fiery oval hovering over the mountains. He filmed it with his phone, knowing that although it might just be the moon hiding behind the clouds, he said, “I chose to let that feeling of fear and possibility affect my imagination. his image.” Inspired by 19th century mental photography, he created these images from star fields in Mexico and set the scene in his New York studio.
Stella Blackmon
Stella Blackmon looks up at her grandmother’s house in Ozark, Mo. “If you look up to southwestern Missouri, your view could be one of three things: the sky, the surrounding hills, or a tree. And on warmer winter days, that tree can have a baby in it,” she wrote. For her, trees were a place to run away from as a child. “You can get to the point where no adult seems to be able to. I remember feeling like it was my own hidden universe,” she added. “I wanted to capture that feeling of wonder.” Her cousins, shown in a sycamore tree, are keeping the tradition alive.
Ian C. Bates
Ian C. Bates traveled to the back streets, woods, and riverbeds near his home in Marin County, California, as well as a friend’s ranch. “I like the idea that looking up at the sky can be a simultaneous event for an entire country — 2017 solar eclipse, Chinese balloons, a storm coming in, orange skies from burning smoke forest,” he wrote. “But I think it’s equally special to be able to look up at the sky alone, in consolation, be it in the field with the birds singing or to stare at the towering redwoods.”
Ali Cherkis
Looking up is a challenge for Ali Cherkis, who has found that among other New Yorkers, “most of us are looking down to avoid eye contact or step into a mysterious puddle, or look on our phones, or maybe we’re deeply introspective, thinking about that is very important. The tourists here are the ones looking up, unscathed by the seagulls about New York’s special existence, and the rats too.” However, doing it “helped me remember how life was unfolding above us,” she wrote.
