Exit 38 — Jacob Lakatua

Sixteen frames from two rolls of 120, all Ilford Delta 400 in T-Max developer, all square 6×6 through the Mamiya 6 MF along the I-90 corridor east of North Bend — the Iron Horse trestles, the climbing crags at Exit 38, the cloudbanks settling over the Cascades. Overcast and overgrown, the Pacific Northwest does its work without spectacle: rust on rivets, ferns on basalt, ropes on rock, wires on weather. The square format strips away the horizon’s pull toward the cinematic and asks each frame to stand on its own four equal sides — what’s left is structure, scale, and the patient layering of stone, steel, and second-growth conifer.

Climbers thread vertical lines up granite faces while trestles span the ravines that the rail beds left behind. Power transmission stitches it all together overhead, crossing forest and fog with quiet equivalence. Elevation here is not a summit but a system — the gradient from gravel rail-bed to canopy to cloudline to the mountain breaking through. Delta 400 in T-Max holds the wide tonal range of these damp afternoons without forcing drama, letting the slow weather and the slow ferns and the slow weight of the basalt set the pace.