The Light That Was Already Leaving

There's a particular kind of attention you pay to a place once you know you're leaving it.

I know that now more than I did in 2007, when my wife and I were beginning to understand that Lexington wasn't going to be home forever. She had career opportunities pulling us elsewhere, and the honest truth is that I didn't fully absorb what that meant until I started pointing a camera at things I'd been walking past for years without really seeing.

That's what the Unseen: Kentucky series is about, at its core. Not Kentucky as a travel destination or a scenic backdrop, but Kentucky as the particular place I was in the process of walking away from.

The camera I used was modified to record infrared light, wavelengths beyond what human vision can detect. I had it built specifically for this work. Infrared photography does something uncanny to the landscape: green foliage goes white and luminous, shadows deepen past what daylight normally allows, skies turn heavy and dramatic. Everything familiar becomes strange and slightly otherworldly. At the time, I thought I was making a documentary series. What I was actually doing, I think, was finding a visual language for memory before the memories had fully formed.

The horse country around Lexington is its own kind of place. The three-plank fences, the tobacco barns weathered past any attempt at restoration, the Keeneland backstretch on a quiet morning before the crowds arrive, the pastures that roll in long slow waves toward the tree lines. I'd lived with all of it for years, close enough that I'd stopped noticing the particulars. The infrared process gave it back to me. It made the ordinary strange enough to actually look at.

I spent a lot of 2007 and 2008 working through those landscapes. Keeneland was a recurring subject, not because it's iconic (though it is), but because it captured something about the relationship between ritual and place that felt important. The racing season, the placing bets, the interlude between races where everyone mills around looking both purposeful and unhurried. I made images there that feel, to me, less like documentation and more like atmosphere preserved in silver.

The tobacco barns were harder to articulate at the time. They're monuments to an agricultural history that was already fading when I was photographing them, structures so deeply embedded in the central Kentucky landscape that they'd become almost invisible through familiarity. The infrared process made them monuments again, rendered them as massive and deliberate against the white sky.

There's an image in the series called Frog Creek Passage that still stops me when I look at it. It's quieter than the Keeneland work, more understated, a creek moving through tree cover with that characteristic infrared glow on the leaves. It looks like a place that exists slightly outside of time. Which, I suppose, is exactly what memory does to places we've left.

We moved from Lexington to Washington state in 2008, and I eventually landed in Tucson in 2011. The Unseen: Kentucky series came with me, though it took years to fully understand what I'd made. That's often how it goes with personal work. You make something in the thick of living it, and the meaning clarifies later, at a distance, when you can see the shape of the whole thing.

The infrared process, I've come to believe, is inherently a nostalgic one. It doesn't show you what your eyes would have seen. It shows you something adjacent to that, something filtered and transformed by light you couldn't directly perceive. That seems right, for work made in a place I was already, quietly, beginning to carry with me.

The series is part of my permanent fine art collection, available as archival giclée prints in the Unseen: Kentucky. If central Kentucky's landscapes have any resonance for you, whether you're from there or just drawn to that particular geography, I'd be glad for these images to find their way onto your walls.