The Illumination of Dark Places
Various sizes ~ 12.5” x 12.5”, 2023

I discovered these early color glass photo plates shot all over the Russian Empire before the fall of Nicholas II and was totally enraptured by them. These were images of a world largely frozen in time, vast expanses that still seemed wild and untamed, with religious temples rising out of the ground completely out of place with their surroundings but with their own striking, anachronistic beauty. These pieces are meditations on the imposition of civilization onto these wild frontiers, and a portrait of a world primed to rise up during the Russian Revolution shortly thereafter.