Time & Perspective Quote by John Sexton

Sexton frames photography not as a single decisive click but as a two-act ritual: exposure, then revelation. By calling printing "part of the magic", he pushes back against the popular myth of the camera as an instant truth machine. The darkroom is where intent gets tested, where the photographer stops being a collector of scenes and becomes an editor of meaning. That word "magic" is doing double duty: it signals wonder, but it also smuggles in the idea of craft that looks effortless only after years of practice.

The emotional stack he lists - exciting, disappointing, rewarding, frustrating - reads like a compact manifesto for process-based art. It admits that control is real but partial. In the darkroom you can coax, dodge, burn, and revise, yet the image still surprises you: paper chemistry, exposure times, and the stubbornness of the negative all fight back. That tension is the point. Sexton is quietly arguing that photography's depth lives in the feedback loop between vision and material, not in the fantasy of seamless execution.

Context matters: Sexton comes out of the Ansel Adams lineage, where printing is ethics as much as aesthetics - a commitment to tonal nuance, patience, and honest looking. As an educator, he isn't romanticizing suffering; he's normalizing it. The subtext is a lesson to students raised on frictionless digital previews: the "few moments" of swing between triumph and failure are not a glitch in the practice. They're the practice.