I’ve been a documentary photographer for over two decades, but starting around the turn of the millennium, I found myself drawn to a very specific subject matter: endangered, night-dwelling animals. I photographed sea turtle hatchlings along the North Carolina coast as well as a bat census being conducted in the North Carolina interior. Both stories involved misunderstood, rarely-glimpsed creatures whose eons of adaptation to their environment were suddenly no match for human-inflicted habitat destruction.

 

The unsuitability of the human environment continued to dominate my thoughts at that time, and what constituted “unsuitability” began to enlarge in scope. There were some serious illnesses in my family, and seeing loved ones try to navigate the modern world when they were sick, weak, or frail, pointed a damning finger at the ruinous pace of it. There seemed to be no place for slow healing, no allowance for the world to move forward ever so incrementally rather than in a rush. The day began to feel toxic; the night seemed more and more of a haven from the human subjugation of time.

 

During the past few years, I've been exploring this haven of night with large-format cameras. It's a rewarding and completely singular type of shooting. The exposure times range anywhere from 3 minutes to 3 hours for one shot, which is lit by the ambient light available at the scene. Sometimes that lighting is the beautiful cool softness of moonlight; sometimes it's the lights of town; sometimes it's my own kitchen stove light. Scenes that were already touching in some way become even more poignant when it takes such a long time for enough light to build up on the film to make the exposure. The photograph that results always has a haunting quality of light because, in fact, it was impossible to “see” the scene that way in real time; it only exists after long build-up of light on the film and the way the different elements at the scene respond to that long duration of light. In a sense, the photographs are time capsules that have never existed in real time.

 

This past winter I spent 2 weeks shooting in the Scottish Highlands. Interestingly, while the same photographic techniques applied, this foreign landscape felt absolutely revelatory. More than any sort of traditional tourism, staying out all night in the cold and the wind and the rain with the sheep in the paddocks and the graveyards that border the North Sea and the ruins that pre-date Stonehenge—these were the experiences that gave me a visceral indication of how a human society would develop in response to the natural world around it. As forbidding an experience as it was to be out there night after night, it also gave me a deep appreciation for what we, in our rush to modernity, have lost.