About the work

I make two kinds of photographs. The first are landscapes of country with no human trace in them — no roads, no fences, no powerlines. The second are deep-sky compositions built up over months of clear nights.

I have been doing this for nearly thirty years. The landscapes are increasingly on film — 35mm, 120, and 4×5 — because film handles southern light in a way that I have not matched digitally. The astrophotography is necessarily digital, but the principle is the same: I am after the long average, not the snapshot.

Most photographers of celestial objects work in a single night. I work in seasons. Fourteen nights of clear sky, stacked across a winter, summed into one frame.

The prints I sell are made archivally on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, signed and numbered on the verso. Editions of fifteen. I also run workshops, and develop and scan film, in a small studio in Canberra.

— Humayun