When I started MAGNETIC:FIELDS on January 7, 2026, I was thinking about how invisible forces shape what we see and what we don’t. Building on Ethereal Echoes, I stayed with cameraless photography, using magnets as a polar resist on expired silver gelatin paper so light and chemistry could collide in unpredictable ways. I wanted the materials to resist control, the way life in a charged moment refuses neat resolution.

I made this work in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the shootings of Renee Macklin Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24. I wasn’t trying to document events or explain loss in 31 chemigrams during those 31 days in January. Instead, the darkroom became a place to sit with the tension around them: the shock, the anger, the quiet that follows. Each print is a small field where grief, fear, and care could surface without needing to depict a scene.

Working with expired paper meant accepting stains, fog, and failure as part of the language. Some sheets resisted chemistry, some broke down quickly, some revealed ghosted marks I couldn’t have planned. That unpredictability felt honest, echoing the uneven way power moves through the world and leaves its marks.

MAGNETIC:FIELDS is not an answer but a way of staying with a question: what lingers when power and vulnerability meet in the same space? These prints are traces of that encounter, made in a city still absorbing what happened, asking the viewer to slow down and feel the push and pull of the fragile space in between.

R. J. Kern