While We Slept

While We Slept is Pete Mauney’s culminating book of a decade spent flipping his sleep schedule to obsessively photograph the firefly population near his home in rural New York State.

Mauney’s masterful images depict accurate representations of time, space, and patterns among the lightning bugs illustrating the magic that occurs while we sleep. The book is interspersed with reflections by prominent photographers David Hume Kennerly and Tim Davis as well as biophysicist Orit Peleg and Mauney himself, contextualizing Mauney’s work and process among the arts and science. Mauney’s in depth account of his process through Q & A, attempts to bring the reader into his experience of what it takes to capture the ethereal spirit of the firefly and share some of his first-hand observations of what he’s noticed over time.

Pete Mauney (b. 1967) is a photographer and photographic technician. Mauney received his MFA and BA in photography at Bard College with a prior two-year stint at NYU in film. He has worked with a number of distinguished clients supporting on a range of levels such as art reproduction, fine art printing, and drum scanning. For the past decade, Mauney’s personal work has focused on documenting fireflies and airplanes in the evening, applying his technical knowledge and skills to accurately depicting an accumulation of time in space. His work has been featured on NPR, Wired, Chronogram, and Colossal to name a few and is in multiple collections including the Morgan Library and The Black Gold Museum in Saudi Arabia.

(Foreword) Tim Davis (b. 1969) is an artist, essayist, and songwriter based in Tivoli, New York. Davis is a Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize recipient. He received an MA from Yale University and a BA from Bard College, where he is an assistant professor of photography.

David Hume Kennerly (b. 1947) won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for images of the Vietnam War and other work he made in 1971. He has photographed every American president since Johnson. He is the first presidential scholar at the University of Arizona.

Orit Peleg (b. 1983) is a computer scientist, biophysicist and Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder in Boulder, CO. She is known for her work on collective behavior of insects and the biophysics of soft living systems, including honeybees and fireflies.

Jessica Chappe (b. 1994) is a mixed media storyteller and an oral historian based in Catskill, NY. Her projects focus on how people find belonging through community, place and self. She received a BA in Photography at Bard College in 2016.