Colton Rothwell – Shadow Machine

One wet winter, stuck inside and missing a place he liked to wander, Colton Rothwell built a machine. He called it a shadow machine — a homemade apparatus meant to conjure the dappled summer light of a flooded gravel pit on the edge of his town, and with it the memory of a single look he’d once exchanged with another man across the water, before turning and walking home.

The project that grew out of it gathers photographs of the machine working, images of the overgrown landscape where it happened, and the warm-toned Van Dyke prints the apparatus itself produced — light recorded directly onto hand-coated paper.