After seeing Lynn Saville’s Night/Shift, it got me thinking about night photography. I have worked with the idea before, but I haven’t ever really sat down and thought about why I am so drawn to photographing at night, it’s only been a part of a larger idea (like with light painting in Concepts and the Surveillance work I did in Location). I think one of the reasons why I am so drawn to night photography is because you can really see the transformation that a place goes through at night, everything looks very different under the street lights and house lights. The dictionary defines transform as to change something in “structure, appearance, or character.”
“What impels many of us to photograph at night is our fascination with the transformation of reality by the passage of time; the compression of time into a single image.”-Steve Harper
“The night photograph is an expression of time as a single still image, but our senses can only percieve time as a continuum. Night transforms our experience of the world from one routine certainty to one of mysterious unknowing.” -Lance Keimig
Night Photography: Finding Your Way in the Dark by Lance Keimig
Keimig, Lance, and Scott Martin. Night Photography: Finding Your Way in the Dark. Amsterdam: Focal/Elsevier, 2010. Print.
This book outlines various night photography techniques and styles, and give you a good introduction to the origination of night photography as far back as Stieglitz's and Steichen's photographs in New York. Various photographers have contributed work to this book, and provide an inside look at how they produced the images.
Below is one of the images from Troy Paiva's book Night Vision, which I feel illustrates the ideas expressed above.
"Transform." Webster's Dictionary. Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 2004. 760. Print.
Keimig, Lance, and Scott Martin. Night Photography: Finding Your Way in the Dark. Amsterdam: Focal/Elsevier, 2010. Print.
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