Fern Nesson, All, Here All Now, 1/24, 2018, Archival digital print, 20 x 30 inches

When my father died, the sun went out. I felt the night sky open to infinity, icily reaching away from me in emptiness. For two years, nothing could console me for his loss. But then I took up my camera. Without any conscious purpose, I began to shoot at night. At first, my images were mostly black, sometimes with a small dot of the moon in the far distance.

In time, points of light crept in. Increasingly, I became more interested in finding light than in recording darkness. The dark of night became a space filled with energy, illumination, complexity, life and liveliness, even warmth. Photography, my father’s passion, gave me the courage to face both his death and mine.

Roland Barthes asserts that "a photograph is a witness [to] what has been. Every image is an image of death." But Barthes is wrong. A photograph can create its own energy. Like Cezanne's paintings, it can live and breathe. I use my camera to create life and to defy death, to embody the moment when mass becomes energy.

In these images, I capture energy through phosphorescence. Physicists define phosphorescence as “the radiative transition between states of different electronic spin multiplicities.” But I say it is the light within, a persistent glow. Phosphorescence is energy that remains long after the material subject of the photograph has vanished.

When my photographs express phosphorescence they transcend their inanimate medium, reminding us that we, too, will transcend. We are eternal. Those we have loved live on -- and we will too.

For my father, whose light persists. - F.L.N

Fern L. Nesson is a fine art photographer whose has had solo exhibitions in Boston, Jamaica, Rome and Torino , Italy, Budapest and Barcelona. She published numerous books of photography. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Budapest, the University of the West Indies and Harvard University.