“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” economist and computer scientist Herbert Simon warned in 1971. Jonathan Knight’s meditative series Exhale meets that dilemma head-on, asking viewers to slow down and truly look. Known for ethereal, minimalist images, Knight conceived the project to explore the nuances of color and, as he puts it, “the emotional experience of looking.”
Portraits of atmosphere, rendered through water
While the photographs are, on one level, images of water, Knight frames them more like portraits of atmosphere. Clear skies brimming with stars appear alongside foggy mornings, and there are glimpses of a billowing release of rain from a heavy cloud. The work privileges quiet transitions over spectacle, building a cumulative sense of stillness that unfolds with time.
That temporal quality is central to Knight’s intent. Exhale emphasizes long exposure and a restrained register over “flashiness,” favoring scenes with few defining events so attention can settle on subtle shifts of tone and light. The result is an invitation to linger—to practice noticing.
Slowing the camera in an age of speed
For Knight, the project “grew out of my background in both photojournalism and landscape architecture, and from thinking about how we experience landscapes differently when we stop trying to document them and simply spend time with them,” he says. He describes “a technological tension at the heart of the work,” noting, “We now live in a culture of instantaneous image-making, computational photography, AI-generated imagery, and endless visual consumption. Yet I’m deliberately using technology to do almost the opposite: to slow the photographic process down and make images that resist immediate consumption.”
That resistance shapes both the pictures and the way we approach them. By tempering the pace of image-making, Exhale also asks for a slower pace of looking. In doing so, Knight shifts attention from the quick capture to the felt experience of time—clouds coalescing, fog lifting, rain released—seen through water and sky.
See more on Knight’s Instagram.
