Slow Light (2012-present) explores the phenomenon of afterimages—residual impressions of light that persist on the retina after staring into brightness. These optical traces linger at the edges of vision, shaping perception even as they fade from sight. This work attempts to capture this perceptual experience that falls outside conventional photographic logic.

The initial research for my work with afterimaging involved mapping my own retina and incorporating that information into the creation of an artificial retinal membrane embedded with light-sensitive strontium aluminate. With a custom-built camera, I expose an image onto this photoluminescent membrane, which glows and fades over time. To preserve the image before it disappears, I then contact expose the membrane onto large-format color film, allowing motion and duration to shape the final image.

Afterimages carry a transgressive charge. They appear most vividly when we use our eyes in ways we shouldn’t: by staring too long, by looking at something too bright. When I moved to Louisiana in 2012, I was struck by the appearance of oil refineries at night; they looked like strange forbidden cities, starting fires in the sky. When I began photographing them, I was repeatedly stopped by local police and private refinery security and told that photographing these structures was prohibited under post-9/11 regulations, even when I was standing on public land (which is not true).

In response, I developed a long-term practice using afterimaging techniques to document the petrochemical industry in the Gulf South, particularly the 85-mile stretch of river parishes between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, often referred to as "Cancer Alley" or "Death Alley." The predominantly Black communities in this corridor, choked with over 200 industrial plants, bear some of the highest rates of pollution-related illness and cancer in the U.S. I set out to render the fossil fuel infrastructure of this corridor as unearthly and vanishing, with these forbidden sites reimagined as otherworldly relics of our destructive past. These industrial forms are reframed as decaying artifacts of a violently extractive system—living emblems of white supremacy culture that must be confronted and dismantled.

The resulting photographs are spectral records—distorted, vibrating, and chromatically drifting—of a man-made landscape that extracts from life in the river parishes, while remaining largely invisible to the rest of the country. These works occupy a space between documentation and abstraction, presence and disappearance.

AnnieLaurie Erickson