Daily Inspiration Quote by John Sexton

There is a quiet drama in the way Sexton stages the moment: not the click of the shutter, but the re-entry into ordinary sight. Under a large-format camera’s focusing cloth, the photographer is literally cut off from ambient light, peering at an inverted image on the ground glass. “Submerged” isn’t decorative; it’s experiential. He’s describing a temporary sensory deprivation chamber that resets the eye. When he resurfaces, the world hits with “startling” intensity, and the ferns flare “green” like a revelation.

The intent here is pedagogical as much as lyrical. Sexton isn’t selling technique for technique’s sake; he’s pointing to a discipline of attention. Large-format work forces slowness, and slowness changes perception. The cloth becomes a ritual boundary between the rush of looking and the act of seeing. Coming “out from under” reads like waking up, or leaving a chapel, which quietly elevates the mundane subject (ferns) into something almost shockingly present.

The subtext is that modern vision is dulled by constant exposure and speed. Sexton’s “minute or two” is an argument against the tyranny of instant images: your senses need time in the dark to notice what daylight has been flattening. As an educator, he’s also modeling what students often miss - that the most important transformation in photography happens inside the photographer. The fern’s green didn’t change; the viewer’s threshold did.