From Dust to Dust

January 2024

Camera: Nikon F100
Lens: 50mm f/1.8
Film: Kodak Gold 200

Is my love truthful, or is it self-serving? Is it giving, or taking? Sadly, I'm generally forced to answer the latter in both cases. What I put out into the world is fear, death, and dust. The specks that gloat on the surface of my negatives are the offscouring of my own flesh: from dust was I made and to dust I return. I put on these white cotton gloves now to handle the film with greater care, but then the dust clings to the white gloves instead of the image. My shame is hidden from the world but, sooner or later, I'll have to throw those gloves away and use a new pair if I'm to continue refraining from coating my images with my shame. My prints are pristine but my trash can is filled with the soiled white gloves nobody ever gets to see.

What produces the dust of death must also therefore be dead. I am a corpse emulsifying the world around me and thereby subjecting it to death. But I am emboldened to believe in the resurrection of the dead, and that the slices of time I capture might portray a living world.

“But someone will say, 'How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?' Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain—perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as He pleases, and to each seed its own body.” (1 Cor 15:35-38)

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18)

I can't truly love until I cease from fearing, and I can't live until I die first, and then perhaps I'll see the dust on the surface as the means by which the light permeates the image.

“There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.” - Leonard Cohen