Just Frozen

Inkjet print on cotton rag paper.

30x21.50x1"

Limited edition 1 of 10.

This image was made on the same night as Yellow Houseboat — minutes apart, the same frozen lake, the same hoar frost, the same difficult evening that sent me out alone with my camera into the dark.

I was tentative about being out there by myself. The lake had just frozen and the sky was doing something I had never seen before — a dark wall of cloud rolling in from one side while the last of the light held on at the far end of the bay, illuminating the yellow houseboats on the shore.

The hoar frosted trees caught that light and held it.

And then, standing there alone on the ice in the quiet, something shifted. There was no Aurora. There was no one else. There was just the bay, and the light at the end of it, and the extraordinary peacefulness that sometimes arrives when you stop resisting where you are.

I stayed longer than I had planned. And I got the photographs I needed.

Part of my Life in the Knife series, Yellowknife Bay, Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories.