"Say That Again"

Months before, I'd photographed this exact same vase under this exact same light through this exact same grating, and the image that came out then was soft, atmospheric, almost halo-like. That earlier piece is called No But Listen. Somewhere between the two photographs, the grating broke — just enough to disorder the precise spacing that produces clean spectra. A disordered grating doesn't fail to make rainbows. It makes softer ones, where wavelengths overlap and bleed instead of dividing.

Say That Again is the architectural one. No But Listen is the atmospheric one. Together, they read as a conversation between two states of the same instrument — one that measures the world, and one that remembers it.

A diffraction grating splits light into the full visible spectrum — what you're seeing is real light, photographed, not edited.

The second photograph in the Counterpoints Vase Suite piece.