Privacy
What this site collects, which is close to nothing.
The short version
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, embeds no third-party trackers, loads no advertising, and has no login, no comments and no newsletter. There is nothing here that follows you. The one place it receives anything from you is the contact form, and only if you choose to use it.
What is unavoidably processed
The site is served through Cloudflare, which as the hosting provider processes standard request data — IP address, user agent, requested URL, timestamp — to deliver pages and to protect the site from abuse. That is a function of being reachable on the internet at all. Cold Light does not receive, store or analyse that data for ordinary page views.
The contact form
There is no email address on this site because this domain has no mail service; an address printed here would bounce in silence. The contact form is the way through, and this is exactly what it records.
When you press Send, the form stores what you typed — name, email, subject and message — in a database the editors read. Alongside it, and stated plainly rather than buried: it also stores the IP address the submission came from and the browser user-agent string, together with the time. Those two are kept to make abuse of the form traceable, which is the only reason a form on a site with no other collection needs them at all.
Only the message is required. The name, email and subject fields can be left empty, and a message sent without an email address simply cannot be answered.
What arrives is used to read, answer and act on your message. It is not added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list; it is not sold; and it is not passed to anyone else. If you want a submission deleted, send another saying so and it will be removed.
External links
Articles link out to sources — publications, institutions, archives, and photographers' own sites. Those sites have their own privacy practices and this statement does not cover them.
Changes
If this ever stops being true, this page changes first, with a date.
Last reviewed 6 August 2026.