If you’ve ever driven a backroad in June with the windows down and the radio off—just you and the soft strobe of fireflies winking above the roadside scrub—then you’ve felt the spell Pete Mauney has spent the last 13 years trying to bottle. Or maybe “trap in silver halide” is more accurate. The Tivoli-based photographer, who graced the cover of Chronogram back in August 2017, has turned his camera toward the dark in search of light—specifically, the ephemeral glow of Photinus pyralis, a.k.a. the common eastern firefly.

Mauney will speak tonight at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (doors 5:30pm, talk 6pm) as part of the “Meet the Artist” series, supported by the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation. He’ll present selections from his long-running firefly series, images that collapse hours into single frames and trace the airborne scribble of bioluminescent courtship with almost cartographic precision. If this sounds equal parts science and sorcery, that’s because it is.

The talk coincides with the release of Mauney’s new monograph, While We Slept (Goff Books, 2024), a luminous artifact in its own right, featuring essays by presidential shutterbug David Hume Kennerly, art-world trickster Tim Davis, and biophysicist Orit Peleg, alongside reflections from Mauney himself. Also screening later this summer on the festival circuit (including at DC/DOX on June 13) is Into the Dark, an 18-minute short documentary that offers a quiet meditation on Mauney’s nocturnal practice.

This is not your average nature photography. Mauney, who studied film at NYU before snagging a BA and MFA in photography from Bard, blends the aesthetics of time-lapse, abstraction, and obsessive cataloging to render the invisible visible. His images, like astronomical charts or madman’s notebooks, show not what the eye sees but what it might dream.

When not stalking fireflies in the hedgerows of the Hudson Valley, Mauney lives in Tivoli with his photographer wife and their two kids. He collects antique medical instruments and other people’s old negatives—because of course he does.

Attend in person at CPW or catch the livestream on their YouTube channel. Either way, you’d be wise to step into the dark. You might see things.