It was the first summer of COVID. The beaches were opening (officially). We saw everything through the lens of the virus.

If a virus could see, it wouldn’t see well. Its vision would be fuzzy, impersonal.

I’d used a pinhole lens for many years, and I’d recently learned pushing my camera to its limits rendered something old-timey, pointillist.

The closer you got, the less you could see. We all knew the feeling.

The pictures really came alive when I graded them. They looked 160 years old, but the process was distinctly, inherently digital. It reflected the timelessness in the air.

Something ancient and inextricably modern.