J.W.M Turner, "Heidelberg" (1846)

"The sun is God," the great English landscape painter J.W.M. Turner is supposed to have said before breathing his last.  Anyone who knows anything about his work would, of course, instantly recognize the appropriateness of such an exit line, whether or not he actually said it.  Turner’s canvasses have been described as “detonations of light,” and so they are.  The sun does not so much dominate the sky as devour it in thick effusions of white and yellow and red.  Generations before the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists, Turner dispensed with form in favor of light and atmosphere.  The art critic John Ruskin, an early champion of Turner’s work, acknowledged that he was something of an “infidel” and “a sun worshiper of the old breed.”  Turner would stare directly into the sun for such extended periods that onlookers wondered how he could do so without destroying his eyesight. "It hurts my eyes no more than it would hurt yours to look at a candle," he assured them.

Pagan though he might be, Turner’s fixation on the sun would apply in some measure to every landscape artist, not the least photographers like myself.  If a good photograph is knowing where to stand, as Ansel Adams once said, then we might add it is knowing where to stand in relation to the sun.  To begin with, you can’t point the camera directly at the sun, except at the extremes of the day.  Shooting into the sun is possible at dawn and dusk only because the sun is actually below the horizon, its rays refracted in the atmosphere.  Pointing a camera anywhere near the sun when it is much above the horizon will produce lens flare or a blown-out image.  If the sun were indeed God, it might not appear in any photograph, but its light would announce its presence with every object it fell upon.