Julie Anand and Damon Sauer are collaborative artists based in Phoenix, Arizona who began working together in 2005. In their project Echoes of the Passage, they photograph the visual markings left behind on space capsules, rockets and orbiters that have been launched into space and returned to Earth. Like scars on our bodies, these marks reference the history of each journey.  Impacted by energy, gravity, objects in space, or/and forces beyond our current knowledge, the photographs document time and space, taking the viewer on an imaginative journey reaching beyond human experience.

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

We are intrigued by the mark-making connected with traversing the earth’s atmosphere—a charge imbued upon artifacts that have been to the void and back. Having negotiated access to collections of rocket bodies, space capsules, and orbiters, we take clinical, abstract, detailed views of the burns, abrasions, and other markings on their surfaces. A soft round treatment for the typological convention draws attention to the act of observation—invoking the telescope, the microscope, and occasionally, the eye itself. In some images, transformed artifacts refer to celestial objects floating in the black void. We imagine that the objects we photograph may hold auras of embodied experience and we hope that our photographs are likewise vehicles for contemplating going beyond.

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

Anand and Sauer are artists based in Phoenix, Arizona and have been collaborating since 2005. Anand currently serves on the National Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education and as Associate Professor of Photography at Arizona State University. Anand and Sauer’s collaborative work has been featured in Wired, Places Journal, Harper’s, National Geographic, and Hyperallergic, exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC and is held in the collections of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer

©Julie Anand and Damon Sauer