White Stone

Stone gives back only what lands on it directly, which makes it an honest and slightly unforgiving subject. There is no water to carry the light sideways, no snow to soften it into a glow. What you see here is exactly the portion of the outcrop that faced the moon for the length of the sitting, a rim of brightness along the upper edge with everything below it left almost entirely to guesswork.

I chose this rock because its top edge runs in one continuous curve for nearly its whole width, so the lit line reads as a single stroke rather than a scatter of small highlights. Fifty-five minutes was needed to let that stroke build enough density to survive printing; anything shorter left it too faint to hold against the dark mass beneath.

The waxing crescent noted on this plate is a little fuller than the first. It was still a young moon, low enough in its cycle that the light it threw was cool rather than silver, closer to the color of the stone itself than to the water two sittings later would return. I like that the two earliest plates in the room share that coolness — it is the closest thing this collection has to a season.