Look to Windward — Jay Toups

A photo captured of an ancient stave church in northern Norway, this photo is meant to elicit a deep, almost supernatural fear of the unknown in a way that we have all felt before. Fear can be a familiar good, keeping us safe in our moments of drawing too close to a flame. It can also inspire us to overcome and to look beyond ourselves, challenging the thoughts that bind us and giving us the necessary fuel of fight or flight that pushes us onward. Fear can be a friend, or a foe, to all of us. We can't choose what scares us, but we can learn how to respond to the ways that fear makes us feel. This church is just a building, creaking wood and crumbling shingles, but it evokes something primal in us that sends the imagination reeling with thoughts of spirits, power, good and evil, the graves around it rising up like pillars to another world that we could slip between if we dared. Fear is present, all the same, whether we choose to take the next step and explore inside or not.

AFTER DARK