This site is the personal photography project of Andy Cleavenger.
Actually "project" isn't the right word. It's probably closer to a ritual but without the burden of zeal. So what do you call that... a coping mechanism maybe? The point is I'm not religious about it. After all, I don't promise to document every sunrise. The deal I made with myself was if I went to the office then I shot the sunrise, assuming there was one. However, rain, weekends, and days off were allowed.
I needed an escape, not an obligation.
As far as why I started, it began as a daily attempt to find control in a situation where I controlled absolutely nothing. To try and make something... anything... out of the day that I was given. The only choices available to me were my own reactions to the conditions I was presented with. I couldn't control the clouds, the wind speed, or the position of the sun, but I got to choose how to frame the world; what to focus on, what to ignore, which instant to capture, and how much light to gather. At the outset I did not anticipate how much of a security blanket the resulting collection would become for me. Scrolling through this website has become a pretty reliable way for me to calm down when I'm stressed out. I like how small it makes me feel... how stupid and insignificant it makes my problems seem.
As a general rule, I do not embellish color or contrast. My goal while processing is always to replicate what I saw with my own eyes as closely as possible. That said, it's also worth pointing out that all photography is a fiction. No digital sensor or film ever made is capable of capturing the range of color or contrast that the eye can perceive. Even worse, there's no screen or paper ever made that can reliably render the full range of information that a digital sensor or film is capable of capturing. To say nothing of the fact that all images are 2D representations of a 3D world. All this is to say that I only have a very small fraction of all the available visual information to work with when rendering an image. But the goal is always to create a faithful approximation of what I saw. Nothing is embellished for the sake of making a single image more interesting.
I’m not particularly sentimental about individual images either. Some people have told me they see spiritual lessons in the work, but the collection doesn’t do that for me. For me this effort is more akin to cataloging data. The continuity of the collection and the adherence to process is more important to me than any one particular shot. I don’t even sell prints. In my opinion, if this work says anything, it only does so as a complete corpus... one massive grid that confronts the viewer with all of time in a single glance. Only when seeing them all at once like this do I start to remember the infinite possibilities that each day holds.
Now that I've just emphasized how much continuity means to me, I also fully admit that this project's continuity has been broken multiple times. I shoot these from a 14-story building on my employer’s campus. So when COVID sent us home in March of 2020 I lost my perch for shooting the sunrise for well over a year. The subsequent three years of hybrid work have also left conspicuous absences on this project. Flash forward to today and I'm again losing continuity while I take several months off to recover from spine surgery. I've begun to view these gaps as an inevitable fingerprint I leave on the project. They are flaws that tell their own story, and it's admittedly a story I'm still deciphering.
The last quirk that I feel requires explanation is the year end date I used in the beginning. I first got the idea to do this on January 10, 2017. So for the first few years I used that as the beginning of my year. This means that for a while I included January 1-9 in the previous year's images. But that practice really only made sense when the continuity was unbroken. COVID threw all those cards up in the air. So from 2021 on I adhere to a normal calendar year.
***Update: 3/9/2024***
I have added a new section to the website to showcase some of the common phenomena I see during the process of shooting sunrises. These include common cloud types, some atmospheric optical phenomena, and even sunspots. I'll admit up front that the cloud types have probably been the most challenging to identify. I feel I have a good grasp on the system for labeling them, however trying to find authoritatively labeled examples to compare mine with has been very challenging. There's either a very wide latitude allowed for identification, a high percentage of mislabeled images, or both. As such, I've done my best to use the broadest possible terms for cloud types in the hopes that it increases the odds that I've sorted them into the right buckets. That said, I admit I have no meteorological training of any kind. So take my identification choices with a grain of salt.
***Update: 4/13/2024***
I have added another new section to the site that identifies a lot of the common landmarks seen in my images. It'll be pretty boring for most people, but if you're a Google Earth junkie you may enjoy it.