This work digs into the sites and archives of the Black Mountain College. Folded between the Blue Ridge and the Smokies in North Carolina, Black Mountain was an incubator for some of modernity's most influential American offspring. Using the material poetics of paper negatives, the long hidden latent image, and a 35mm rangefinder manufactured during the school's existence this work seeks to perhaps glorify? unearth? seek to seek? what forces may have come together to form this moment in modern art history that we alter-moderns can never know. This short-lived utopia; this outcropping of the Bauhaus and the New York School, how did it land in the western Carolinas? Could this enclave have thrived in any other landscape? What did we miss? And what could we have had if this alternative model for education was still active today?