Vue dramatique en noir et blanc d’un complexe de gratte‑ciel modernes dominant le front d’eau de Chicago.

The title comes from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where the family moved when Greg was nine and stayed until he was fifteen — six winters of farm country, comic books bought with allowance money and strawberry earnings, and superheroes (Batman above all, but Daredevil and Spider-Man too) who fascinated him precisely because they struggled with what they were. In the last of those winters, Wisconsin State University-Oshkosh held an Ingmar Bergman symposium and screened every available film; father and son attended every one, and The Seventh Seal in particular did something that took decades to fully name: it made him simultaneously an optimist and a nihilist, a condition he has not since resolved. Standing on the south side of the Chicago Riverwalk years later, preparing for a workshop in architectural photography, he looked up at Chicago's second-tallest building in the hazy afternoon light and did what those Oshkosh years had trained him to do: he imagined moonlight, a figure in a cape at the edge, and the entire scene rendered in Bergman's high-contrast monochrome — light and shadow as moral categories rather than technical ones. The image is what that imagination looks like when you have a camera.