Within Sight
Chapter 6 Phlebopus marginatus
My aim is to pay attention to what ordinarily escapes notice: marginal light, peripheral spaces, and the quiet intelligence of natural systems. This grouping of images centres on Phlebotus marginatus—often called the ghost or bioluminescent fungus exploring illumination not as spectacle, but as a disciplined form of attention. The fungus’s faint glow becomes both subject and metaphor: a reminder that revelation does not announce itself, but waits to be perceived.
I am drawn to processes rather than events. My images rarely present dramatic moments or decisive narratives. Instead, they dwell in thresholds—between light and dark, growth and decay, presence and disappearance. Layered textures, organic forms, and subtle shifts of luminosity ask the viewer to slow down and to look again. What emerges is not a representation of nature as object, but an encounter with nature as collaborator. My images in this series - Phlebotus marginatus is not about depiction but participation, marking time, observing decay and renewal through the fungi's own fragile radiance.
William Blake’s insistence that “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Blake did not argue that the world must be transformed, but that perception itself is clouded—dulled by habit, ideology, and instrumental ways of seeing. To cleanse perception is to recover depth within the ordinary, to rediscover infinity folded into the finite. Blake was a poet of visionary eruption, I aim for visionary restraint. We share a conviction that how we see determines how we live; that perception is never neutral; that attention itself carries moral weight. I do not aim my images to demand awe, they are a device asking for patience. Infinity is not introduced—it is revealed through sustained looking.
Blake’s metaphysical contraries—light and dark, body and spirit, decay and renewal—find a perceptual parallel in my work. My photographs operate as fields of quiet tension, where opposites coexist without resolution. The glow of the fungus does not banish darkness; it depends upon it. Meaning arises not through declaration, but through proximity and care. A component of my intent is to acknowledge, seeing as an ethical act. To notice the faint, the marginal, and the ephemeral is to resist a culture of speed and spectacle. The reward is not certainty, but intimacy: a recognition that wonder often resides precisely where we have forgotten to look.
Paul Lambeth 2025
I am drawn to processes rather than events. My images rarely present dramatic moments or decisive narratives. Instead, they dwell in thresholds—between light and dark, growth and decay, presence and disappearance. Layered textures, organic forms, and subtle shifts of luminosity ask the viewer to slow down and to look again. What emerges is not a representation of nature as object, but an encounter with nature as collaborator. My images in this series - Phlebotus marginatus is not about depiction but participation, marking time, observing decay and renewal through the fungi's own fragile radiance.
William Blake’s insistence that “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Blake did not argue that the world must be transformed, but that perception itself is clouded—dulled by habit, ideology, and instrumental ways of seeing. To cleanse perception is to recover depth within the ordinary, to rediscover infinity folded into the finite. Blake was a poet of visionary eruption, I aim for visionary restraint. We share a conviction that how we see determines how we live; that perception is never neutral; that attention itself carries moral weight. I do not aim my images to demand awe, they are a device asking for patience. Infinity is not introduced—it is revealed through sustained looking.
Blake’s metaphysical contraries—light and dark, body and spirit, decay and renewal—find a perceptual parallel in my work. My photographs operate as fields of quiet tension, where opposites coexist without resolution. The glow of the fungus does not banish darkness; it depends upon it. Meaning arises not through declaration, but through proximity and care. A component of my intent is to acknowledge, seeing as an ethical act. To notice the faint, the marginal, and the ephemeral is to resist a culture of speed and spectacle. The reward is not certainty, but intimacy: a recognition that wonder often resides precisely where we have forgotten to look.
Paul Lambeth 2025
