Cloudberry
Photography · Solar-Powered Camera · Raspberry Pi
The simplicity of the Cloudberry photographs hides the complexity of the solar-powered camera system that makes them possible. For a year, a camera affixed to our family’s cabin on Pinchard’s Island photographed throughout the day. Each frame was uploaded via cellular network and opened in a browser window, so my family and I could access a place that is inaccessible most of the year, and return to the experience of looking out the cabin’s window. The camera stands in for us. These photographs constitute a political act: they allow an uninterrupted foothold on a place emptied by resettlement.
Where Barrens pursued singular, large-scale photographs of Newfoundland’s land and weather, Cloudberry turns that impulse toward quantity and duration. The photographs are at once static and dynamic: the frame remains exactly the same while the landscape constantly changes. Sky, ocean, and terrain shift more readily than the rocks, but even their appearance eventually transforms as seasons change. Though Cloudberry highlights the specificity of this particular landscape, it also manifests the familiar desire to connect to one’s homeland not as a relic of the past but as a place that is alive.
The name Cloudberry references the local wild berry, colloquially known as a “bakeapple,” that flourishes on the seemingly inhospitable land. After a year the system failed. What remains is the archive.
