Untitled (Fireflies inside the body of my camera, 8:37-8:39PM, June 26, 2008) 

Folded Poster by Aspen Mays

$30
Published by Deep Time Press
2024

20 x 25 in (folded: 10 x 15 in), four color print on 70# uncoated paper, edition of 100

Available for purchase on July 18 to coincide with the 2024 SF Art Book Fair.


Untitled (Fireflies inside the body of my camera, 8:37-8:39 PM, June 26, 2008) was made in a field at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Michigan at the height of summer when Mays was still in graduate school. Stymied by her initial attempts to photograph fireflies' unpredictable blinking in the fading light, she decided to place captured bugs inside the body of her camera so they could crawl on and expose the film itself. Expecting that their flashing would still register as discrete points of light, she was amazed to find the resulting image looked more like a color field painting, nothing like the fleeting, temporary, seasonal strobe of the fireflies.

Aspen Mays (b. 1980) was raised in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of Photography at the California College of the Arts. She is represented by Higher Pictures in New York, and recent honors include a 2021 Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mays was also a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky, an experience that has made a lasting impact on her work.

aspenmays.com