The Same Sky, Otherwise

A Global Collaborative Photography Project

Kim Richardson (USA) with Keith Grosbeck (Canada)

The Same Sky, Otherwise is a collaborative photographic project unfolding from January 15, 2026 to January 15, 2027. Working across distinct geographies in Santa Fe and Vancouver, the artists produce parallel bodies of work through a shared, weekly practice: photographing the sky each Thursday—morning, afternoon, and evening. The project engages the sky as a shared yet unrepeatable field of perception, reflecting on simultaneity, difference, and the poetics of light as both universal and subjective. As Dōgen writes, “If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”

Structured as a year-long call-and-response, the work is grounded in an intentional practice of attention. Each image becomes an encounter with the present—rooted in lived experience while remaining in dialogue across distance.

The project builds on the legacy of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, in which clouds function as both subject and index of inner states, grounded in the assertion that “the sky and clouds are there for everyone.” This proposition is extended into a contemporary relational framework of shared authorship. A second reference is Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s cyanometer, whose gradated scale of atmospheric blue situates the work between observation and abstraction.

In response to the bicentennial of photography, the project returns to the medium’s elemental condition: the adoration of light. It reflects on light’s phenomenal beauty as constant and variable, authorship as distributed, and photography as a sustained practice of attention.

Outcomes include an exhibition structured through circular and grid-based installations, a publication integrating images and texts, and public conversations on process and collaboration.