Incidence

I make photographs with the moon. No camera, no shutter, no darkroom. Just light-sensitive paper, an unconventional lens, and whatever the night decides to give me.

Each month, when the moon is full, I go out to meet it. I set up conditions and step back into a conversation with nature, guiding moonlight onto photographic paper, painting with a light source I can influence but never fully control. The moon, the atmosphere, the paper's chemistry: these are my collaborators.

Over time, I've learned this conversation well enough to know what yields what. I can coax certain effects, steer the light toward particular results. But the moon and the air and the night always have the last word. Some exposures don't work. That's not a limitation. It's the point. The images that emerge sit somewhere between intention and accident, shaped by a craft I've developed and by forces that remain indifferent to it.

Each piece is bound to a place and bound to a time—a particular full moon, a particular night's atmospheric conditions, a particular stretch of ground. So far, all of this work has been made in Montauk, New York, though I intend to carry the practice to other locations. The specificity matters: not just which moon, but where on Earth I'm standing under it. There is no separation between the experience and the document. The exposure is both the event and the record, collapsed into a single act.

I came to this work through an equal pull toward photography, physics, and astronomy, and the three feel inseparable here. These are photographs in the most literal sense: light writing. But they're also physical records of something much larger: the relationship between this planet and its nearest neighbor, made visible on paper. The work connects to time, place, celestial cycles, and the actual physical universe. The abstraction in the images isn't a stylistic choice. It's simply what moonlight looks like when you give it a surface to land on and get out of the way.