out on the sea, we’d be forgiven

These images are RA-4 interpretations of negatives exposed to the light of the aurora borealis over the Deer Isle Bridge on the coast of Maine. Color prints were made with the negatives and then scanned, aligned, stacked, and adjusted repeatedly to maximize the dynamic range of both print and negative.

visions of light I; this is the base ra4 scan I was working from

visions of light ii; a high contrast take on an ra4 scan

visions of light iii; aggressive post processing of a scanned ra4 print

the ferryman waits to take you to the great beyond; do you accept his invitation?

palatial perception; panoramically assembled strips of film with adjacent images remaining in the printing field, giving chronological context to the set together

In terms of panoramic theory, this image set revealed something fundamental about how memory maps onto spherical space. Using a 6x7 film holder with 6x4.5 images created not just beautiful juxtapositions of auroral features and landscape elements, but opened up a way of understanding how multiple perspectives combine into a larger spherical projection. Each frame becomes a piece of curved memory, contributing to a whole that more closely mirrors how consciousness perceives space, while the overlapping frames create redundant information that, when properly stacked, yields higher effective resolution and dynamic range than any single capture could achieve.

The RA-4 printing process proved crucial here - not just for bringing out low contrast images from C41 cross-processed ECN-2 negatives, but for creating multiple interpretations of the same negative that could later be stacked and blended. Each slight variation in filtration and exposure created its own truth about the captured light, while the overlapping frames, when mapped onto a curved projection surface, fundamentally changed the nature of the final image. Unlike a single frame captured on a flat image plane, these panoramas build themselves through accumulation and overlap of rich visual information on the negatives, each frame contributing its own perspective to a more complete vision.

My workflow, undeniably hybridized between analog and digital processes, takes advantage of both worlds: the organic richness of analog color printing and the precise control of digital blending and stacking. Working on the scans of the prints isn't just post-processing - it's part of a larger philosophical approach to image-making that understands how multiple perspectives, multiple processes, and multiple moments of seeing can combine to create something truer than any single capture could achieve. Through careful attention to spherical geometry and the deliberate accumulation and blending of multiple perspectives, we can create images that not only show us what was there, but how it felt to be there, seeing it.

subglacial consciousness

In other times you’ve been all of the greats. You’ve been all of the leasts too. You’ve been old and young at the same time forever.

In this time, you are, more specifically, a stream, with a little overlap with a child whose fascination was you.

She saw you like perhaps no other had. She saw you for the truths your freestone waters carried, saw universes in the slightly silted sunbeams lighting the soft white underbellies of the creek chubs gold as they darted over the aureus bed of the stream.

She would in her walks by you discover that she was alive, that she was here now, that consciousness too was here, in you and her likewise, observer and observed in reciprocity.

She would immerse herself in your waters and dream of your waterfalls. She would find herself by your flow when she was lost in the swamp you terminated into behind her house when she was alone and her boots got wet and it was getting dark and she hadn’t done her homework yet and it was dinner soon. 

She would find in your icy winter shores and in the way you absorbed the snowflakes into darkness by the glow of the mall and airport off the blizzard clouds of her winter childhood a secret you couldn’t keep to yourself, a secret you never bothered to hide. 

She would discover that time is a supercritical fluid which condenses into all of Being with every successive breath and heartbeat and firing of the electron transport chain, that the dialectical tension between inhalation and exhalation carved an echoic truth in its tidal rhythmicity, that from her perspective flow and thus change is the truth.

The biogenic magnetites in her brain aligned themselves to the cardinality of your south to north flow, and she traversed the world one step at a time in line with your banks.

Whenever her world turned upside down she came to you. In fact it often would, and you were always there.

Your dappled surface carried her sorrows and worries away, your denizens illustrated her archetypes. You became the world within the world to her.

One summer she found a lead weight in the shallow riffle and an aged net just below your long pool beneath the cataract cut into the berm that once carried an electric trolley over your waters. 

She wondered what fishing you was like when you once might have held brook trout, before the warming came and the highway and before it was never dark save for the stars anymore. What the world looked like when you were but a rivulet, when the ice scraped your basin into the hills on its way to the sea.

The choreography of your becoming lent its epochal momentum to hers. Your shores an altar, your forested banks a multifoliate cathedral in which the ritual of her embodiment unfolded.

She once dug out a small spring on your shores, carving over hours one snowy evening with a shovel a basin among roots where the waters of a long slope trickled through the rocks and soil, percolating with a musicality never heard, a rhythm never revealed, that is until she picked up the shovel.

She found on your banks the truth of herself in the midst of all being. She traversed many a strange loop of pondering on your sloped bank, and basked after hopping the rocks beneath the cataract picking berries one summer afternoon when she was ten after vacation and the world glowed anew as the coming evening’s light fell through the trees and the smell of the forest and your flowing waters rang familiar on her nose and she ate your wild salmonberries.

She cries as she writes, and the water molecules of her tears will one day again wind up in your current, and the sun will rise, just as the stars will rise, and the moon and the planets for that matter, and all of Being will glint off your waters in her mind, all of eternity will flow through your freestone course. 

And you were but one.