Night Comes Slowly

“There is a golden hour between life and death.”—anonymous

I am a landscape photographer interested in the role that the natural environment and the built environment play in conveying the spirit of a place and the health of a community. I have lived off and on in the Arizona desert part time for the past 15 years and made, what for me, is a major decision to spend more time in New York City. The prospect of this change has been very unsettling because the desert landscape is a part of who I have been since I was a child. In my most recent series, “Night Comes Slowly,” a departure from my previous work, I started out with an idea to memorialize my surroundings to convey through photography what living in the desert has meant to me. In going out into the desert alone almost every day for five months to photograph the golden hour, I became sensitized to my surroundings in a way I had never experienced before. I found that there is no discreet time that the golden hour “starts or ends,” I needed to be out photographing before the golden hour so that when it came, I would be ready to capture it moment-to- moment—the subtlety, the warmth, the final burst before dusk, the darkness of night descending. And the more I went out to shoot, the more in tune with the natural rhythm I became. I experienced a calm and a oneness with the environment that I had never felt before. Working on this series has helped me accept that changes in life, like changes in the rhythm and light of the day, are inevitable and can be a good thing. In that one hour I was experiencing the whole cycle of life.

The photographs in this series are captured digitally and presented as archival pigment prints on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag in editions of 7 + 2AP. Print size is available up to 24 x 34".