I am very grateful to Amy Arbus for selecting this. print for the Soho Photo Gallery’s 22nd International Alternative Processes Competition that will open in New York on December 2 and run through December 20. This platinum-palladium print was made from a photograph I took of the ocean off the coast of Maine in September 2025. The fog was so thick that the whole seascape was enveloped in semi-darkness, but the sun did not give up and there was an aura around it as if it was some spectral being. At the time I clicked the shutter, I was thinking about my father and how he said that his mother appeared to him every night in his dreams, and I wondered if he might appear to me in some mystical way some day.
Now it has a much more universal significance to me. What seems important is how light keeps working to dispel the darkness and how we keep seeking it–especially in times like this. Our country is teetering on the brink of full-fledged crisis, if we aren’t there already, and our democracy is in immanent risk of being extinguished and replaced by an authoritarian regime. Chaos and corruption are so rampant that some days it feels as if it is still night during the day. The orb in this image could easily be perceived as the moon, so for me it captures many states and dimensions simultaneously and the meaning shifts depending on what is occurring in the world.
But it is not just the symbolism of the experience that continues to affect me. Making this print for the exhibition was such a profound and challenging experience that I felt it worthwhile to share. First I will bore you with some technical details. When I submitted it for consideration, I had only made a 6 × 9” print, which looked great. I knew that was too small to exhibit, so I said it would be a 10 × 15” print. As any printer will tell you, any minor blemishes in a smaller print are magnified each time you increase size. Fog can also be quite problematic, as the computer interpolates according to complex formulae and fog can end up looking like the measles when it is natural (as opposed to artificially created perfectly linear fog). It can be difficult to see blemishes in the darks when working on positives, and darks are reversed and become lights in digital negatives so you can’t really see if there are very faint problems when the negative comes out of the printer. Though I wanted the fog to be ethereal, I also wanted to keep texture in the waves. Then there was the issue of rendering the sun, the faint circle around it, and the soft aura radiating outwards, again, not in a mathematically calculated and perfectly symmetrical way, but as it was naturally present with wobbles and variations in shape. Lastly, I wanted softness between zones from light to dark In addition to interpolation difficulties, the coating had to be absolutely perfect, and the dust issue is always lurking. I vacuum and have air purifiers in every room, but dust can still find a way into the printer or on the surface of the paper while coating. Normally this does not matter too much, since textures in the print can hide very small imperfections like small dust particles. But to maintain it’s ethereal qualities this print had to be totally smooth. I ended up turning off my ventilation system while coating, so that it wouldn’t recirculate dust. While making these prints, I thought of Barnett Newman and the incredible challenges he had making his totally black paintings. I had a greater understanding of what he likely had to go through and my respect for him and his paintings reached new levels.
I ended up making five digital negatives before I was satisfied, which I have never had to do before, and I printed over three days. On the second day, I made a couple that I was 85 percent satisfied with. In addition to being frustrated, my eye strain from staring so hard into the darkness was getting to me. I went to bed thinking that maybe one of those prints would be okay and I’d just mat and frame an 8 × 12, which is actually quite a fine size. I didn’t want to lose my mind from all the stress. But when I was sleeping I dreamt of another way to fine tune the print and the next morning when I awoke I decided to give it one last shot. I knew I would never forgive myself for exhibiting something I wasn’t totally happy with. The ones from the day before were good, but the sun and its aura were a bit too dull. I couldn’t accept that–I needed the aura and light from the sun to vibrate through the darkness, because I knew it would be harmful to me to stop believing that the light, veiled as it often seems right now, is still there. Even if it can’t get us out of this mess, it still might help me keep going. When I exposed the 8 × 12 and saw no blemishes and a spectral sun, I felt an amazing sense of accomplishment and printed a 10 × 15” digital negative. (The slight banding in the aura isn’t visible in the print, only in the iPhone jpg from interpolation I expect.)
Being proud of myself isn’t something I frequently feel or even need to feel, and it wasn’t merely the print I was impressed by. I was proud of myself for not giving up and I realized that none of us can afford to. I’m not saying it will be easy, but if we vote and work for change we may begin to see positive shifts and then not giving up and all the work we’ve done will be worth it. I recently read a post by Heart Phoenix on the page for The River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding. She wrote, “Every act of nonviolence matters,. Every refusal to dehumanize matters. Every time we choose courage over fear, it matters. This horror is human-made. So, too, can it be undone by humans. I do not deny the pain of this moment. But I refuse to give up on humanity.” If we don’t choose to believe this, we will truly be lost. And we have to remember that there are good intentioned people out there ready to help rebuild our country and world.