Fleeting Light

A photograph can create the illusion of a moment frozen in time. The "momentness" of a photograph gives it value, but it also emphasizes the loss of that moment. When looking at old pictures, I feel both pleasure from the stimulated recollection and sadness from the irreconcilable distance of that captured moment. This feeling heightens when the photograph's subject connects to a specific time. A child at a certain age signifies a particular point in time that has passed. Even more fleeting is the color of light throughout the day. The light produced when the sun is close to the horizon is visually potent because of its connection to the passage of time. This light, the golden hour, is inescapably connected to a fleeting moment. It is simultaneously beautiful and ephemeral.

In my day-to-day life, I sometimes experience moments that feel like magic. I feel a deep, sublime sense of awe and appreciation of life in these moments. I feel this in the late afternoon in the summer, playing with my daughters in the backyard under the warm golden hour light. I feel it in the evening when things have quieted enough for our neighborhood black bunny to hop out of his hiding place and join me in the front yard.

These images reveal a magical world in the quiet moments of everyday life. The power of the photos is in the tension between familiarity and mystery. These are scenes of everyday life, but the specificity of the gaze and the ambiguity of the iconography give them a meaning beyond the literal moment they depict.