Erickson’s images of these oil refineries, made forbidden by insinuation if not by law, became Slow Light​, a series of photographs recorded by a hand-made “retina” camera.  This camera attempted to replicate the physiological phenomenon of afterimages mechanically, by first capturing light onto a surface embedded with strontium alluminate, a photo luminescent chemical, and then releasing the light slowly onto film.  The strontium alluminate produces ghostly smudges of light and color.  The resulting photographs inhabit a supernatural space that objectively reveals little of oil refineries.

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Although we know that the photographs in Slow Light were all taken in 2013, Erickson has chosen to withhold further information about the time of year or the exposure length of each image.  The photographs are titled with their precise geographic coordinates, fixing their location but not their time of creation. What Erickson has revealed, however, in her care to foreground the retinal camera and the title of the series, Slow Light, is that she has further elongated the process of recording light onto film.

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Indeed, most acts of photography slow down light, which propagates slower when passing through materials such as glass, which camera lens have in abundance, but returns to its original velocity as soon as it’s through. In the last 20 years, scientists have found ways to further slow down light and even to stop light completely.  In Bob Shaw’s 1968 short story “Light of Other Days,” people living in cities used glass that slowed down light so much it took a year for light to pass through to record pleasant views. They then placed this slow glass in their windows, to enjoy a year of bird watching, for instance, instead of staring at the laundromat across the street. Erickson’s Slow Light photographs were delayed by their second exposure process and not by slow glass.