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.