Every so often, there’s a moment that refuses to be caught in a photograph yet demands to be recorded. A full moon rising over the mountains is the classic example. You stand there watching it lift itself into view and it feels impossibly large and impossibly close. Then you take a photo and the whole thing collapses into a tiny white dot. The lived magnitude evaporates. And yes, telephoto lenses and yadda yadda. But you’re still making tradeoffs and you’re always losing something of the experience.

I’ve been reading about the unrepresentable sublime. Kant described the sublime as the moment when the mind confronts something that exceeds its ability to fully grasp — a kind of cognitive stretching in the presence of vastness or power. A guy called Lyotard called it “the unpresentable,” the part of reality that resists being captured, translated, or contained.

This gap between lived experience and captured image is becoming a central thread in my work. I’m interested in the moments that exceed their own depiction and that feel too large, too meaningful, and too magical to survive translation to a photograph. The unrepresentable sublime is where emotional magnitude explodes the frame.

There’s a new idea too of the AI sublime. It’s the awe or dread, depending on your perspective, that comes from facing the scale of large AI models. It’s the same concept as feeling dwarfed by towering mountains, violent storms, or the open ocean.

I’ve been exploring how I can layer in more of the emotional experience onto the photography, whether through encaustic or other mixed media. I’m looking for ways to go beyond the optical fact, without discarding it, and see how far I can push a photograph toward the unrepresentable sublime and still let the truth of the lens shine through.