One of famed astronomer Carl Sagan’s most powerful sayings was the phrase, “we are made of star stuff.” He was referring to the fact that the basic elements making up everything on our planet, including we humans, were forged in the bellies of ancient stars.
This notion of connectivity is the basis for photographer Ignacio Torres’s series of GIFs titled Stellar. Through four-frame animations, which show humans twirling among their own little clusters of stars and galaxies, Torres aims to express our ineffable link to the cosmos.
“I think people immediately grasp it, the concept of being made from stars,” says Torres. “I chose to conceal the subjects’ faces so people kind of see themselves in the imagery."
The project is a simple expression of a vast and humbling thought. Early stars burning many billions of years ago acted as giant furnaces that fused atoms together to form heavier elements, like helium and carbon. These elements were ejected into the universe when the stars inevitably collapsed and exploded, eventually coalescing into the basic matter that now makes up our bodies and every thing around us. It’s a reminder that we're all part of the same cosmic lineage.
Torres’s images of people intertwined with celestial formations attempt a symbolic language for this shared history. His subjects seem suspended in space, either being born of the Earth or falling from the sky in apparent spasms of creation. The three-dimensional aspect of the GIFs is meant to add a sense of depth to both the bodies and the galaxies, and reinforce the connection between the two.
The images in Stellar are made with a special special Nishika N8000 35mm film camera that simultaneously takes four side-by-side frames. The galactic clouds are actually handfuls of flour and reflective confetti, sprinkled digitally with extra stars. All the photos are scanned together to create the looping GIFs. Originally the series was going to be shown with red/cyan anaglyphic glasses, but he ditched that idea in favor of the more modern format.
“I thought it was kind of like digressing in technology if I went with glasses rather than wiggle stereoscopy,” he says.
Everything was shot over five evenings at sunset near El Paso, Texas, where Torres was born and raised. Its deserts ignited his imagination as a backdrop for his photos and an arena for exploring their concept; an empty primordial wilderness that could serve as an analogy for the earliest moments of our world.
“There’s not very many resources or places in El Paso but vast landscapes of desert,” he says.
As a launch and research hub for the likes of NASA and SpaceX, Texas is one of our main gateways to outer space. It’s also a contentious border state. In that sense it’s especially relevant to Torres; having grown up in El Paso with family on both sides of the border, he's had a lifelong sense of ambiguity about his cultural identity, feeling as much an American as he does Mexican.
It’s a common question of identity that many people struggle with, and it’s precisely the kind of struggle that Carl Sagan’s message is so powerful at undermining. No matter how hard the divisions seem, in the eyes of the cosmos, we’re all made of the same stuff.
“My work kind of stems out from my interest in identity and the human experience...it’s always about identity and the way we perceive ourselves,” Torres says. “The core concept in the Stellar series is our identities as humans. We’re all the same, we’re all connected.”
