And He Rested (2026)

The following are excerpts from Logan de Raspide Ross’ photobook And He Rested (2026). It is available for purchase in paperback format, just send me an email!

And He Rested is an analog series of photographs read through the verses Genesis 2:2–9 and 2:15, and what they imply about the link between rest, beauty, and labor. During the great labor of creating the heavens and the earth, God created grass, fruit trees, animals, and even mankind. But it is only after he rests that he plants the garden of Eden, that the trees he planted blossom beautifully first, then for their fruit, valued first for something ineffable than for their stated utility. The insight is that the real gift the beautiful trees offer is not just their fruit's nutritional value, but perhaps especially their visual quality.

When God gazed out at the world on the seventh day, what did he see?

What did he want to see?

Whatever it may be, it may have brought him to introduce, and to value, beauty as fundamentally as he valued the differentiation between light and dark, between good and evil.

There is indeed a beauty that is omnipresent in the world, revealing itself often only briefly, as its omnipresence belies a deep fragility. As God rested following his great labors, he must have held a certain gaze, and it is through this gaze that his perception of beauty was possibly sharpened, leading him to make the garden of Eden so evidently beautiful. Through this gaze we too can begin to see and appreciate the world as he once did, and maybe expects us to still. This restful and unhurried gaze reveals beauty that we often overlook, but are constantly swimming in no less. This beauty can be just as powerful as the eye-catching beauties we normally qualify as sublime and grandiose, it is just a little more shy.

And He Rested is at its core a meditation on the gaze that rest lets us access and what that gaze reveals.