Camera Obscura

I notice this happens to others too. Someone will pause in front of a piece. Their movement slows. They’re not trying to understand it or decode it. They’re simply looking.

That moment of attention—however brief—is what I’m working toward. Not to teach anyone anything. Just to create a space where looking might feel worthwhile again.

I keep making these photographs because I need to return to that space myself. Where motion settles into presence. Where duration becomes visible. Where attention feels possible.

Every photograph I make captures light that began its journey more than eight minutes before the exposure. This fact astonishes me still. That this ancient traveler—light from the sun—ends its journey on a sheet of photographic paper in a darkened chamber, leaving traces I can hold.

I make these images because I cannot get over this. The patience of light. Its constancy. The way it simply arrives, moment after moment, asking only to be noticed.

Hours passed. The light shifted. I had nothing to do but watch it move.

That experience taught me something about time that I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand through photographs. Not time as measurement, but time as something felt, lived, noticed.

I began photographing because I wanted to hold onto what was slipping away. I still do.

I understood something in that moment. Photography had taught me to think of time as instants to be frozen. But what I experienced in that tunnel was duration—time as continuous flow, motion as the visible trace of time passing.

The camera obscura became my method because it allows me to work with duration rather than against it. Eight seconds. Long enough for motion to register. Long enough to feel time passing. Short enough to hold in attention.

What appears as blur is simply the trace of time’s passage. What appears sharp remained still long enough to inscribe itself fully. The photograph becomes a record of what stayed and what moved during those eight seconds.