Road Dog
Firth of Forth, Scotland
29x36 inch C-print
2010

This is my stalwart Nancy Townsend on a bench not far from where we were staying in Edinburgh. The exposure was only five minutes long, and I was behind the bench moving my little reading light the entire time. What I thought I was doing was producing a gentle, ethereal glow under the bench by adding light from all different angles such that it would not appear to come from any particular place. What I was actually doing, of course, was registering my every movement with the pen light. It didn't occur to me until I went back to the camera to stop the exposure that of course the camera would have seen every motion I made with my tiny light source.

An astute friend of mine commented that this photograph is actually a nice portrait of me and Nancy. Well, what she actually said was, "There's Nancy being all solid and grounded in this world, and that (pointing at my light squiggles) is what she has to put up with."