The Light Across

The Light Across is Chris Klatell’s personal reflection on the act of looking at lighthouses at night, as they send their beams across the water. Simultaneously a work of history, a philosophical inquiry and a travelogue, the book questions how we think about similarity and difference in an era of rapid and destabilizing change. Structured as a rotation, like the spinning lens of a lighthouse, the work follows Klatell and the photographer Donovan Wylie as they circumnavigate Ireland and Britain, scrambling over rocks to capture flashes from the opposing shore. The camera and the lighthouse lens, born out of similar developments in nineteenth-century optical theory, emerge as mirrors, structuring identity along the axes of time and distance. The text explores both the difficulty of making these images, and the difficulties the images cause, once made. Ranging from ancient Alexandria to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, from Virginia Woolf to Enid Blyton, and from J. M. W. Turner to Eadweard Muybridge, Klatell’s lighthouses flicker between acts of engineering to guide ships and warn them of danger, to symbolic gestures. Unions and disunions, joinders and separations pile up; Brexit, Covid and Trump come and go; promises to children are made, broken and redeemed. History and literature offer a path, then yank it away. Through it all, the lighthouse flashes on, ambivalent and obsolete, revealing we may not always be the character in a novel we imagined ourselves to be.