Project: Mora

Every year for the past few years, I've made the trip down to southern New Mexico to photograph the gleaming white gypsum dunes at White Sands National Park. Most visitors come to sled, picnic, and watch the sunset. For me, the park is a treasure hunt for lines, curves, color, and light. Hike far enough into the back of the field and the sand is pristine, unmarked by the crowds closer to the parking lots.

White Sands opens at 7 AM and closes thirty minutes after sunset. If you're not out on time, you risk a fine. Over the years I've learned to time my hikes down to the minute. But in 2025, I miscalculated. It took longer than expected to get back to my car, and when I finally did, a ranger shining a flashlight was waiting. I got off with a warning, but that experience changed my plans for 2026.

This year I applied for a special use permit to photograph outside normal park hours. I requested ninety minutes each morning before opening and ninety minutes each evening after closing, across four consecutive days at the end of March. The extra evening time meant I could hike further and not worry about getting back to my van on time. But the real prize was sunrise. Even if you're first through the gate at 7 AM, the sun is already well above the horizon by the time you drive in, park, and hike to where the best dunes are. Very few, if any, people ever see White Sands in that light.

Sunrise flips everything. Light falls on the steep slip faces of the transverse dunes instead of illuminating them from behind as it does at sunset. Think of it like photographing a person with soft light on their face, versus an edge light behind their head. Every image I'd made here up to this point was shot in the afternoon or early evening. Never sunrise, until now.

I documented the experience with video, as I normally do. But to be honest, I wasn't happy with the footage. The editing felt like autopilot, following the same structure and style I default to. So I started thinking about what it was actually like to be there. The mystery of entering a dark place, wandering in dim pre-dawn light, searching for compositions. I ended up throwing out most of the footage and building a short video using only music and environmental sounds to capture the feeling sonically. To bring you closer to what I saw and felt, without me telling you.

What I was chasing has a name. In music, a "mora" is the smallest unit of measurable time. A brief pause between what comes before and what follows. Light has this quality as well. A window just after blue hour and before golden hour, when land and sky are tuned to the same frequency. A melding of color and light that lasts only a handful of minutes before giving way to daylight.

This moment is what everything leads up to. It's the reason for the time and effort. Waking up at 4 AM after long evenings shooting late the night before, driving to the park, and hiking a couple of miles through sand in the dark, day after day, was tough. But that's what it took to be in the right place at the right time. Surrounded by pristine dunes, alone in a 250 square mile dune field.

Thanks to the NPS rangers who patiently waited for me each evening and got up well before dawn each morning to let me in.