Square Format Prints

Ten works that came out square, and most of what is in them is round. A planet's whole disc, the shell of gas a dying star throws off, a galaxy turned nearly edge-on: when the subject is a sphere or a ring, a square is the frame that wastes the least. The Apollo 17 crew had the Earth in front of them from the Mediterranean down to Antarctica and photographed all of it. Voyager 1 looked back from about six billion kilometres and found the same planet reduced to a single point of light. Magellan spent four years bouncing radar off Venus, through cloud that has never once opened.

The rest sit further out, or closer to home. The Helix Nebula is 650 light years away in Aquarius, built from nine Hubble frames blended with a wide-field exposure from Kitt Peak. The Cat's Paw is a stellar nursery in Scorpius, its young stars mostly hidden behind their own dust. The Taieri Pet is one lenticular cloud standing still over a range in Otago while the wind blows straight through it. Nothing here was cut down to fit a shape. Each print keeps the proportions of the work itself, and for these ten that happens to be a square.