STORIES

Lux Perpetua

St Petersburg · Geghard · Tbilisi · Bangkok · Dalat · 2023–2025 · 590nm · 650nm · 720nm · 850nm · IR Chrome

An infrared camera inside the temple ritual — candle heat on the faces of the praying, the light the Requiem promised and the eye was never meant to see.

“Et lux perpetua luceat eis” — and let perpetual light shine upon them. This formula from the Catholic Requiem never assumed that we would see this light, much less through special technical means. And yet.

For my dissertation on the history of infrared photography and its digital transformations, I decided to conduct a visual experiment — offering a mechanical scientific instrument (a full-spectrum camera modification) the opportunity to capture one form of invisible entities: infrared radiation during temple rituals.

Infrared photography has existed since 1931 and throughout its history has been used to detect what the human eye cannot see: invisible stars, contours beneath layers of paint, damaged manuscripts, landscapes hidden in atmospheric haze. Internal reflections of infrared radiation in digital camera optics have become subject to the photographer’s visual control — and before our very eyes, they are becoming one of the new creative techniques.

An infrared camera placed in the midst of a temple ritual, directed at those praying, does not capture a miracle. It photographs the ritual participants in a very bright yet wavering “light” — thermal radiation from living flame, hidden from the eye. It captures almost no light from modern ubiquitous LED lamps. It sees fire as thermal energy — herein lies its uniqueness: the heat of candles reflected on the faces of believers. Heat that Palamism would call uncreated energy, Thomism divine assistance, and an engineer simply radiation. But in this interval, in this space, lies something about the essence of the search for light in the modern world.

The infrared camera here helps the viewer connect with the conditions of artistic existence: warmth that is vital for the temple ritual but invisible to the natural eye. This series is a visual meditation on how eternal light becomes visible only at the moment of disappearance, how the praying are already partly inaccessible to this world, held here only by the faint glow of candles and their own warmth.

In the Catholic tradition, eternal light is granted only after death, only to the worthy. In the Orthodox tradition, true light is present in the world but is never visible to natural sight. The temple action takes place in semi-darkness; the eye sees what is happening by the wavering light of a lamp. The infrared camera captures precisely this “wavering light” — that thermal spectrum which is hidden from the natural eye, but which Pavel Florensky would call an integral condition of the temple action.

It is an imprint of warmth created by the interaction of candles and the slow movement of air in the temple. The infrared camera sees this as a single field, as a synthesis of conditions in which true prayer is only possible in a world that is becoming less and less religious.

Isidore of Seville said: “In absentia lucis, tenebrae vincunt” — in the absence of light, darkness prevails. But what if the light is here, but invisible? What if those praying live in a world where lux perpetua exists but is visible only to the dead?

As Florensky wrote: “In the temple, we stand face to face before the Platonic world of ideas.” Does the light fade or last forever? The history does not end — it unfolds into the invisible.

Plates

Georgian Church of the Shestokovo Icon, Saint Petersburg

Easter service, 16 April 2023 · 590nm — and Easter service, 20 April 2025 · 850nm

Geghard Monastery, Armenia

22 November 2023 · 650nm

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Tbilisi

27 October 2025 · IR Chrome (Aerochrome type)

Assumption Cathedral, Bangkok

Christmas service, 24 December 2025 · 720nm

Catholic Cathedral, Dalat, Vietnam

Easter service, 2025 · 720nm

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