A German photographer's search for memories of meteorites took her from Alabama in the US to Rajasthan and Lonar in India
A witness to the meteorite that fell in Kanwarpura in Rajasthan in 2006
A Meteorite is a very seductive object," Regine Petersen writes to us. The 42-year-old German photographer has been chasing shooting stars, but not in the manner that we'd imagine. Less interested in their wondrous flash, that lasts but seconds in the night sky, Petersen has been looking at the footprints meteorites left behind on earth, both in human memory and rock formations. It would seem that the seductiveness of these space rocks appeal like diamonds to a jeweller; Petersen is charmed by the crude rockiness of meteorites as much as their cosmic glint.
Regine Petersen. Pics/Courtesy Regine Petersen and JaipurPhoto 2018
Her series, Find a Fallen Star, made between 2011 and 2015, will be on view at the third edition of JaipurPhoto, which opens this Friday at Jantar Mantar, Jaipur. The series, which was also published as a book by Kehrer in 2015, has three chapters from Alabama (USA), North-Rhine Westphalia (Germany), and also Rajasthan. The project started when Petersen stumbled upon the story of Ann Hodges, a woman who got hit by a meteorite in Alabama in the 1950s. "I wanted to know what became of her, how the incident had affected her life. I also started to look at the phenomenon of meteorite falls in general. I realised how many witnessed incidents there had been and that there are collectors and meteorite hunters out there," writes Petersen over email.
From the series Find a Fallen Star: Eye Witness (Gisalal) and Kanwarpura
Stitching together events
The excursion to find witnesses of meteorite impacts and first-hand accounts led Petersen to firstly photograph meteorites in private and public collections and to meet those who had a starry story to tell. "I was interested in those instances when our daily life on earth is interrupted by a meteorite falling from the sky - what happens when a space rock crashes into somebody's home in Alabama, or falls in front of Rajasthani shepherds, or is discovered by German school children? The randomness and particularity of such an incident resonated with me - I took on a perspective that looks at the individual stories of eyewitnesses and the way these are embedded in the cultural and political situation of their environment, yet always filtered through my own experiences in these places and the questions I was asking myself," she explains.
At the outset of the project, Petersen didn't have a concrete idea of the outcome, but followed up her curiosity with research, and organised funds to travel, which took up quite a bit of her time. With such a long-term project, it meant that her ideas and plans changed constantly depending on the discoveries she made. "During the research, and while speaking to the witnesses, another aspect shifted into focus - how these events are being remembered and what gets lost in the process... the manifold personal perspectives, the fallibility of memory, the barriers of language and the power structures at play defining whose voice gets heard," she writes.
The Indian accounts
"Meteorites are witnesses to the birth of our solar system and billions of years old, which is awe-inspiring and abstract at the same time. Once they reach the earth they become historical objects, objects of scientific curiosity, religious veneration or collector's items. People project all sorts of ideas on them. And, when they collide with our everyday lives, I think, they open up a space for thought and make for some interesting stories," she says.
Some such stories are right here in India. Working with analogue medium and large formats, Petersen travelled to Kanwarpura in Rajasthan, after hearing about a meteorite that crashed there in 2006. "A news article said that two shepherds had seen the meteorite fall, then beat it with sticks and immersed it in water. I first thought there was some kind of superstitious motive behind it, as is often the case when meteorite falls are observed, and the article seemed to allude to that. But, as I found out, the witnesses had been pushing the meteorite with sticks simply because they thought it was hot, and dumped it in the water to cool it down," she recalls. On meeting some of the witnesses (an interview with them in their Hadoti dialect is part of the book version of Find a Fallen Star), some were afraid that the meteorite could be a Pakistani bomb. "There is an atomic power plant nearby so people suspected that a bomb had missed its target," writes Petersen.
The photographer also visited Lonar crater in Maharashtra, a national geo-heritage monument with a saline soda lake, the Ramgarh crater in Rajasthan and to the meteorite depository of the Geological Survey at Kolkata where she photographed several of their specimens. "I had many meteorite-related adventures during these years that did not make it into a visual or written story. But there was a second publication that came into being: A Brief History of Meteorite Falls, which is a collection of 100 witness- and newspaper accounts I considered noteworthy," she adds.
A look at the skies is enough to raise those enigmatic questions about our purpose on earth. And, for Petersen and the meteorite witnesses, it has been no different. "It is alienating but could also be a potentially uniting experience for mankind to see itself at a distance. My experience though is that as soon as a rock falls, people often start to quarrel about ownership and monetary values."
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