Artist, Nina Katchadourian: If it’s a bright day, you might be able to see dust hanging in the air near these big windows. Dust and light can interact in ways that bring out the best in one another. In an 1898 essay called “The Importance of Dust: A Source of Beauty,” the British naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace points out that dust “gives us much of the beauty of natural scenery as due to varying atmospheric effects, and cloud, and sunset tints, and thus renders life more enjoyable.”
MoMA film curator Josh Siegel spoke about how mesmerizing dust can be.
Curator, Josh Siegel: One of my favorite things to do, at a very early age, was to turn back and look at the projector, uh, that was shooting the beam of light across the theater, against the movie screen, and notice all the particles of dust that would float in that beam, that would be caught by that beam of light.
There’s actually something dusty about the medium of film itself. A film by Harmut Bitomsky, called Dust, points out that film is made up of tiny silver salt particles stuck to a transparent base. When you hear about “film grain,” that’s actually quite literal. It’s particles that form a picture, particles that when projected inevitably highlight the free-floating dust particles that are in the air. Or, as Bitomsky says, “Film: that is dust, lighting up in the darkness of the movie theater.”