A note from the artist

The places you reach for but never attain.

Neverland is one of them. A forested stack with its own weather. Its own trees. Standing in water that doesn't move like water. Beside it, a smaller spire. Sharp, alone, close enough to be a companion but not close enough to touch.

The three stones in the foreground mark the edge of what's possible. Beyond them, the water goes quiet. The island holds its distance.

I come back to places like this when I need something to wonder at. Not a destination. Not a goal. A fixed point on the horizon that stays where it is while everything else moves.

Places like this wander with us. They are the fantasies that manifest and are never out of sight. We build them from the pieces we love. A tree line. A silhouette. A kind of light. A perfect outcome. An ideal.

We put them somewhere we can see from where we are, and we let them hold still.

Neverland is one of mine.

A note from the artist

Slightly more beautiful than the truth.

Neverland was photographed on the Washington coast on New Year's, sometime after midnight. The only light on the water was the moon and whatever the sky reflected back.

The exposure was longer than a minute. That's what gives the water its stillness. The eye doesn't see water like this. The camera does, if you ask it to hold still long enough. Look closely at the sky above the stack, and you can see star trails. The earth moved while the shutter stayed open.

I had been watching the way the foreground stones lined up with the sea stack behind them. The composition was already there. I started experimenting with exposure, trying to let the moonlight carry more of the frame.

The humidity, the reflected moonlight, the long open shutter. All of it combined to make the stack look like a mirage. A place I could see but not reach. A ghost of an island on the first night of the year.

I work with a lens and a camera, tools made to document the world. Here I let them see something the eye doesn't.

A mirage travels with you because it comes from you.

What you are feeling is real.