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Exhibitions / Still Life / Diamond Ring - text by Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean films the climax of a total solar eclipse.

I have a philosophy now, borne out of much necessity, that sometimes things go wrong in order for them to go right. So when it was overcast on eclipse day in Cornwall in 1999, it enabled me to make the film that everyone agreed was much more me. Or when I trusted the light meter in a camera from another epoch, my near vanished film turned out more authentic to my project than anything I could have manufactured. But at the time, of course, these uninvited situations are unbearably painful and disappointing. To be persuaded by circumstance to take another route is never easy, and to trudge along that road to Damascus before the merest hint of con version always takes some endurance, if not faith.

And so it was in the summer of 2001, when I made copious plans with my friend Dick to travel to Western Madagascar to try once more to see a total eclipse of the sun. We survived the cancellation of our plane; we survived the guide and the journey, we survived everything and on the morning of June 21st, we even got the weather. But then during totality-during those highly anticipated two and a half minutes, the camera tipped forward and fell down. Dick and I jointly contributed to cause this accident. I only write this because I think he might want to be acknowledged for his role in the making of Diamond Ring. Suffice to say I was paralysed by the familiar disappointment. It took me nearly the whole of totality to react, and at that point I did something I rarely do, and would never have done: I zoomed in. And at the very moment I stopped zooming, with the sun in the middle of my viewfinder, the moon passed into the next phase releasing a needle of light, which overexposed my film and bleached my frame.


Text by Tacita Dean