The Weight of Light

The project grew out of a residency at Sklárna Moser in Karlovy Vary in the winter of 2021. The factory, founded in 1857 and still producing lead crystal using techniques largely unchanged since the nineteenth century, was facing the prospect of closure — the third generation of the family unable to find buyers who would maintain the craft conditions on which the work depends.

The photographs were made over six weeks using large-format film and exposures ranging from three seconds to eight hours. Molten glass at 1200°C burns film at close range; most images required the camera to be positioned at the edge of the visible spectrum of the material, catching only the aftermath of a gather or the slow cooling of a freshly blown form. The long exposures flatten the distinction between still and moving, solid and liquid.

The oral histories — recorded with Josef Mašek, his daughter Petra Mašková, and his father Miroslav, then 81 — run as an audio accompaniment in exhibition. They do not describe the photographs but speak around them: memories of the same furnace across four decades, the tactile knowledge that cannot be written down, the vocabulary that has no translation outside the factory floor.

The Weight of Light was published as a limited-edition photobook by Fotohof Edition and exhibited at the Fotogalerie Wien (March 2022) and the Fotomuseum Winterthur (September 2022).