Photographer Pete Mauney heads out for work each night, flashlight in hand, wearing highway safety gear. His oversized, orange T-shirt and its strip of reflectors match the traffic cones piled in the trunk of his car.
“Almost everybody thinks I’m a surveyor,” he says. “Except state troopers.”
During the summer months, from dusk until the moon rises, he finds his subjects along quiet stretches of farmstand highway, in abandoned fields and hidden pockets of woods, and the grassy tracks underneath power lines within a 30-mile radius of his home in Tivoli, New York. Mauney photographs fireflies — that is, any night the temperature stays above 60 degrees and there isn’t a downpour.
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