Holding Light by water artist Alexander James Hamilton

Swarm (2008–2012)
Transparency of a Dream (2013–2016)
Morpho, Blood & Water (2023–2026)

For more than forty years, this photographic practice has been defined by continuity rather than discrete series. The works grouped under Swarm and Transparency of a Dream emerged gradually from a closed system of making: analogue large-format film, water, and living subjects brought together under carefully controlled conditions. They are not projects conceived in response to a moment, but works that have accumulated meaning through duration, repetition, and restraint.

Morpho Amathonte 0220, dated 2011
160 × 160 cm | Edition of 10
Sold out

Such an approach aligns this practice with a small lineage of contemporary artists for whom persistence itself becomes a critical position. Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s lifelong engagement with optics and time, or Tacita Dean’s sustained defence of analogue film as cultural memory, the work is grounded in the belief that method is not incidental. How an image is made determines not only its appearance, but the limits of what it can hold.

Materials and Method

The photographs within these lepidoptery works are made directly onto 5 × 4 inch and 8 × 10 inch transparency (positive) E-6 film, a material known for its narrow exposure latitude and the precision demanded by its use. These formats impose a physical relationship to the image: scale, fragility, and consequence are present before any exposure can occur. Working at this scale requires slowness. Each plate is singular, and each decision carries weight.

Water is integral to the process. Submerging the subject alters the behaviour of light in ways that cannot be replicated digitally. Colour separates differently; contrast softens or intensifies unpredictably; focus becomes a negotiation rather than a fixed point. The resulting images often recall painterly traditions — chiaroscuro, tenebrism, and the still-life discipline of the Dutch Golden Age — but they arrive there through physical conditions rather than stylistic quotation.

Alexander James Hamilton holding an 8 × 10 inch transparency plate

Alexander holding an 8 x 10 inch analogue film plate.

In this respect, the practice sits alongside artists such as Adam Fuss, whose work privileges direct physical inscription over representation, and James Welling, whose investigations of colour remain grounded in material processes rather than image effects. The emphasis is not on appearance alone, but on how appearance is produced.

The current butterfly works — seventy-two analogue plates using the final reserves of large-format transparency film — mark a significant point of closure in this long engagement with Lepidoptera, and situate the practice among the very few still working with the most demanding analogue photographic materials.

The Studio as a Closed System

The butterflies photographed in these works were raised in the studio over successive generations. Working with accredited CITES butterfly rearing programmes, a small number of breeding pairs were secured for each species, including Morpho amathonte, Morpho didius, and Morpho helena rhetenor — among the most heavily hunted butterflies in the world.

By importing through approved breeding programmes in South America and Asia, the skills required to establish and maintain viable studio environments were developed over many years. These conditions were not conceptual gestures, but practical necessities. The images demanded continuity, control, and a familiarity with the subject that could only be acquired through long-term care and observation.

Photography here is less an act of capture than one of calibration. Each specimen is introduced into water under precise conditions, allowing it to enter a state of diapause — a naturally occurring metabolic reduction that enables the image to be made.

Underwater photographic process with Morpho butterfly

working with a specimen in water.

The seriousness of this approach finds resonance with artists such as Sally Mann, whose continued engagement with historically demanding photographic processes foregrounds responsibility without recourse to spectacle. In both cases, difficulty is not performed; it is simply accepted as part of the work.

Reconsidering the Butterfly

Butterflies carry a long symbolic history within Western visual culture. Transformation, ephemerality, and the soul have frequently been attached to their image. Over time, however, that symbolic framework has become less central to how the work is understood.

In the present context, the Morpho butterfly is approached as surface and structure. Its colour is not produced by pigment, but by microscopic architecture designed to interact with light. Underwater, and recorded on transparency film, that interaction becomes visible with particular and unrepeatable clarity.

Morpho butterfly surface detail underwater

Morpho, Blood & Water — No. II, 2025
8 × 10 inch analogue film plate

The butterfly remains present, but it is no longer required to carry meaning on behalf of the viewer.

Blood, Water, Diapause

The more recent Morpho, Blood & Water works did not begin as a planned departure from the earlier series. Blood enters these images without symbolism or emphasis. It is present as a material fact.

Water continues to function as the medium through which light is organised and uncertainty introduced. Diapause remains the enabling condition of the image, allowing the subject to be held long enough for the photograph to exist.

Morpho, Blood & Water analogue film plate

Morpho, Blood & Water — No. I, 2025
8 × 10 inch analogue film plate

Continuity and Restraint

What ultimately distinguishes this final body of work is its refusal to accelerate meaning. The images do not announce their significance. They are the result of sustained attention to material, process, and subject, maintained over decades rather than seasons.

In a photographic culture increasingly shaped by simulation and speed, these works remain grounded in physical fact. They do not argue for their relevance. They simply persist.