Moongrams

I have been working at Brighton Beach, NYC during each full moon since August 2025—collaborating with the sea while I press my hands and feet onto the paper to make an image through touch and the body.

The beach at night has become my outdoor darkroom with the ongoing Moongrams project, a series of unique photogram prints. The process involves dipping silver gelatin paper into the ocean and sand at night, exposing each print with the moon's illumination. I have been working at Brighton Beach, NYC during each full moon since August 2025—collaborating with the sea while I press my hands and feet onto the paper to make an image through touch and the body. I’m interested in how working in the dark is intertwined with physical embodiment and sensorial awareness. Alongside the photograms, I’m working on an experimental text where I write about my fascination with image-making as multi-sensory perception, and the physicality in producing this work—weaving many memories from my life and university days when I was a neuroscience major in college.

To date, I have nearly 130 prints, produced in various weather conditions throughout the year during all the seasons. I’ve recently begun making larger-scale prints (42 x 20 in, for example). I would love to make even bigger prints, almost full roll length.

Throughout my practice, photography has always played a crucial role in how I conceptualize and plan my film projects. Working on the Moongrams series and the text is ultimately helping me prepare for my next short experimental film: 12 Unbound Pages, for which I currently have a rough production outline. I imagine the prints being used as part of the set design in some of the scenes, and incorporated into an artistbook that lives as a companion piece to the film. The film will take place across two main settings: eerie/solitary beachscapes at night, as well as a makeshift DIY Moon Apothecary Lab, among others. This film reflects my ongoing interest in darkness as a material, which can also be seen in my previous film From Dusk to Dawn (2024).

General artist statement:
Nechama Winston uses photography, moving-image, and text to question how vision frames a politics of looking, bridging the imaginary with the familiar. Her current focus is in exploring the ways in which darkness helps foster a bodily way of seeing and experiencing her surroundings through different modes of perception. She is interested in using the procedures of photography and cinema as a means to investigate social politics, history, and narrative, while working with the dark as a material and concept. Winston often produces work in black and white as a method of abstraction to push the ways narrative can be conveyed through space. Editing and collaging archival research, still images, writing, and video is often used in her practice to question the validity of the document and to probe photography as a time-based experience. She often interweaves personal experiences and memories with collective ones.