When the WIRED staff found out that Interstellar director Christopher Nolan was going to guest-edit our December issue, we were all super-excited but knew we’d need to execute on a tight timeline. A few days later, we were told that the theme would be space, time, and other dimensions. As a photo editor, I immediately started thinking about what kind of image-based projects would work within those parameters. NASA pretty much has the space photography thing locked up, so we couldn’t do that. Dimensions was just way too intense—how do you represent, say, five dimensions in a two-dimensional medium? (We’ll leave that to Nolan and Interstellar.) And you certainly can’t photograph time…
Or can you? While we’re all constantly experiencing the same moment, it’s in 24 different time zones. One person’s wake-up call is another’s bedtime, your commute home is somebody else’s lunch break. I’ll recruit someone in each of those zones to capture a photograph at the exact same moment. But what moment should that be? More important, what moment could it be that also met our issue deadline? I wanted it to be something meaningful, so I started to research full moons, eclipses, but everything was too late. Then I found it. The equinox (fall in the Northern hemisphere, spring in the Southern) at 2:29 am (UTC) on September 23. Everybody here loved the idea—now I had four days to book 24 photographers. I became obsessed and didn’t sleep all weekend. I made lists of places in each zone (UTC +3: Kenya, Turkey, Finland, Baghdad), and began trying to contact artists around the world. I had this vision of a giant grid of photographs, fading from light to dark and back again. The fact that some of these places were way ahead of me in communication time was killing me. Oh and then…daylight saving time? What do I do with that? There’s 15- and 30-minute time zones in India?! It was way over my head. But I worked with a fact checker and we nailed it down. I’d call up someone I knew in Shanghai, and they were going to be on assignment in Bangkok: “Well, can you shoot Bangkok? And can you give me a name in Shanghai?” There were two time zones that only had one wee island each. This is where Instagram saved the day. I entered #adak and discovered an Adak, Alaska, harbor patrol officer’s secret talent for shooting landscapes. Midway Atoll has a Facebook page for all 30 of its residents. I stalked every single one of them until someone chimed back saying they knew photography and had a camera.
There was a lot of math and a lot of anxiety and so much trust involved. It would have taken just one of those 24 people to flake out for the whole project to fail. Thanks to all two-dozen participants around the globe, that didn’t happen. When the moment hit the WIRED time zone at 7:29 pm on September 22, I contributed my own #equinox photo from my backyard to Instagram.
