The Journey of Light
Part 1 – Eight minutes and one hundred thousand years. What science knows about light: how long it takes to travel – and why we always look into the past.
Part 2 – Holy Light. What the world's great religions see in light – from "Let there be light" to the festival of Diwali.
Part 3 – Light as Life. How plants turn light into life, and what indigenous peoples have always known about it.
Part 4 – The Light of Poets. About light and its twin, shadow – from Goethe to Tanizaki.
Eight minutes and one hundred thousand years
The journey of light from the sun to my image
As a photographer, I work with light every day. At some point, I wanted to know what this thing I work with actually is. What I found out changed how I see the world.
The fastest thing in the universe – yet slow
Light is the fastest thing there is: almost 300,000 kilometers in a single second. Nothing is faster. And yet it takes time. The sunlight currently falling on my subject is about eight minutes old. That's how long it travels from the sun to Earth, over 150 million kilometers. The sun I see in the sky is always the sun from eight minutes ago.
Light older than humanity itself
The journey begins even earlier. In the core of the sun, the energy of light is created by nuclear fusion. It's so dense in there that this energy doesn't simply fly out. It's passed from particle to particle, in an endless zigzag without direction. Estimates range from ten thousand to over one hundred thousand years until it reaches the surface. So the sunlight on my skin carries energy that was already glowing when the first humans walked upright.
A single ray of sunshine connects two times: one hundred thousand years inside the sun – and eight minutes through empty space.
I never see the present
What applies to the sun applies to the entire sky. Because light takes time, I never see the present of a distant thing, but its past state. The moon appears to me as it was a good second ago. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, as it was a good four years ago. The Andromeda galaxy, which can be glimpsed with the naked eye on dark nights, I see as it looked two and a half million years ago. Its light set off when the first humans lived on Earth.
Modern telescopes push this back to the beginning. The James Webb Space Telescope captures light that has traveled for over thirteen billion years – images from the universe's youth. The night sky is therefore not a snapshot. It is an image made up of a thousand different pasts, which merge into a single moment for my eye.
The physicist Albert Einstein showed that this is not a perceptual error, but the nature of things. Space and time are not a rigid framework, but a common fabric that shifts with the observer. A "simultaneity" that applies to the entire universe does not exist. Light, with its unchangeable speed, is the thread that holds space and time together. That is precisely why photography is so closely related to this idea: an image also captures a moment that has already passed by the time I capture it.
Why this matters for my craft
That's exactly what I do with every shot. I capture light that has already passed the moment I press the shutter. A photo and a starry sky are essentially the same: preserved light from a moment that will never exist again.
And something else touched me. Almost every atom in us heavier than hydrogen was once formed in the interior of stars and hurled into space when they died – the carbon in our cells, the iron in our blood. We are, quite literally, stardust. Light is not just what I see. It is what I am made of.
Holy Light
What the world's great religions see in light
Few images are shared by as many cultures as light. Almost everywhere it stands for the same thing: for the divine, for truth, for hope. And almost everywhere the spiritual path is described as a journey from darkness into light.
At the beginning there is a word of light
In Judaism, light is the first work of creation. "Let there be light" – even before the sun and stars. The festival of Hanukkah celebrates with the eight-branched menorah the oil that burned longer than it should have: an image of resilience. Christianity interprets Christ himself as light. "I am the light of the world," it says in the Gospel of John. In the darkest time of the year, the candles of Advent and Christmas carry on this promise – light as hope, born when the nights are longest. Already in Hebrew, the word for light, "or," repeatedly becomes an image for truth and salvation; Jewish mysticism even lets all being flow from the "Light of the Infinite."
Light upon Light
In Islam, one of the most beautiful passages in the Quran bears the name of light: the Light Verse. It begins with a single grand image.
Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth... Light upon light! Allah guides to His light whom He wills.
— Quran, Sura An-Nur (The Light) 24:35
The Arabic word "Nur" means this divine light of guidance. In Hinduism, light is both prayer and festival. An ancient Upanishadic prayer asks: "Lead me from darkness to light." And every year, millions of people celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights: rows of small oil lamps proclaim the victory of light over darkness.
Enlightenment – the light within
Buddhism already carries light in the word "enlightenment." The transmitted advice of the Buddha is: "Be a light unto yourselves." In Zen, the tradition closest to my work, enlightenment is a sudden flash of insight, a moment of clarity. I seek the same quiet clarity when I wait for the right moment.
Elsewhere, too, the sun is central. In Japan's Shinto, the myth tells of the sun goddess Amaterasu, who angrily retreated into a cave, plunging the world into darkness – until she was lured back into the light. The ancient Persians saw in fire the sign of their god of light; the Sikhs speak of the divine light that dwells in every living being.
As diverse as the paths may be – everywhere light is a sign that something greater is near. When I wait for the first light in the early morning, I understand why people have revered it since time immemorial.
Light as Life
What plant researchers and indigenous peoples know about light
Plants can do something that no human can: they convert light directly into life. No relationship in nature is more fundamental – and none is closer to my work.
The plant that eats light
The same thing happens every day in every green leaf. Chlorophyll captures sunlight and builds sugar from it – food, growth, oxygen. Every forest is thus stored sunlight. Every piece of bread is sun that has taken a detour through a field. The botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, herself from an indigenous nation, calls photosynthesis an act of generosity: plants take light and give life back.
Light at the Edge of the World
Ethnobotany explores how humans and plants coexist. Researcher Richard Evans Schultes spent years in the Amazon basin to understand the plant knowledge of indigenous peoples. His student Wade Davis called his most famous book "Light at the Edge of the World". He understands every indigenous culture as its own light – its own way of being human.
Other cultures are not failed attempts to be modern. They are their own answers to the question of what it means to be alive – each a light at the edge of the world.
— after Wade Davis
Every lost language, every forgotten plant knowledge is like a light extinguishing on the horizon. I find this thought both comforting and admonishing.
Structures Awaiting the First Light
Where people experienced the sun as the source of all life, they worshipped it. The Inca celebrated their sun god, and many North American peoples know the Sun Dance. And long before the pyramids, people built according to the light. In Newgrange, Ireland, five thousand years old, on the winter solstice, a single ray of sunlight passes through a narrow shaft into the innermost chamber, illuminating it for a few minutes. A greeting to the return of light – built of stone, aimed at a single moment in the year. For many indigenous peoples, light was also the calendar: the position of the sun told them when to sow and when to harvest.
In the shamanic traditions described by Schultes and Davis, light even turns inward: medicinal plants often evoke visions of glowing patterns during rituals – a light that seems to come from within the person themselves.
When I stand in untouched nature and take photographs, I ultimately capture precisely that: light that has taken shape – as a leaf, as a color, as a living form.
The Light of Poets
About Light – and its Twin, Shadow
Where science measures and religion reveres, literature explores. For poets, light is both: knowledge and longing. And again and again, they focus on its counterpart – shadow.
Goethe and the "More Light"
Hardly anyone was as dedicated to light as Goethe. His "Theory of Colors," which he valued more highly than his poetry, understands colors as the interplay of light and darkness. He coined the phrase: "Where there is much light, there is strong shadow." And tradition puts the wish "More light" into his mouth as his last words. Not all poets, however, sing of brightness. The Romantic Novalis, in his "Hymns to the Night," celebrates darkness precisely as a place of love and secrets.
In Praise of Shadows
But I am closest to the Japanese writer Tanizaki. In his essay "In Praise of Shadows," he outlines a complete aesthetic of twilight: beauty lies not in harsh light, but in the gradations of semi-darkness, in the dull shimmer on old wood.
We find beauty not in the thing itself, but in the play of shadows that one thing casts against another.
— after Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, "In Praise of Shadows"
I experience this with every shot. Without shadow, no form. It is only the interplay of light and dark that gives things their shape – and the beauty of imperfection that attracts me so much in Zen and Japanese aesthetics.
The Crack Where the Light Comes In
Two of the most beautiful literary images of light speak of vulnerability. Rumi wrote eight hundred years ago: "The wound is the place where the Light enters you." The songwriter Leonard Cohen sang the same: "There is a crack in everything – that's how the light gets in." For me, who seeks beauty precisely in imperfection, this is almost a work instruction. And the author Annie Dillard describes a moment when she suddenly sees an ordinary tree "full of lights" – bathed in sun, as if she were seeing it for the first time. This is exactly what mindful photography seeks: to look at the ordinary until the light makes it extraordinary. The poet Mary Oliver once called this patient attention the true form of prayer.
Four Perspectives, One Theme
Thus the journey concludes. Science says: All light we see is the past. Religions say: Light is the sign of the sacred. Naturalists say: Light becomes life. And poets say: Only shadow gives it beauty. I say it with my camera. Photography literally means "writing with light." I do no more – and no more is needed.