Idea Entry #6: Noctural

Idea Entry #6: Nocturnal

I was looking at some artists for next week’s post, and I decided to look at a photo book I checked out from the library by Olivo Barbieri called Artificial Illuminations. The introduction mentioned nocturnal a lot. Nocturnal light...nocturnal exposure....

Dictionary.com says:

noc·tur·nal   [nok-tur-nl] Show IPA

adjective

1. of or pertaining to the night (opposed to diurnal).

2. done, occurring, or coming at night: nocturnal visit.

3. active at night (opposed to diurnal): nocturnal animals.

4. opening by night and closing by day, as certain flowers(opposed to diurnal).

noun

5. Archaic. an astrolabe for telling time at night or fordetermining latitude by the position of certain stars inreference to Polaris.

I really liked the introduction that Enrico Ghezzi wrote for this photo book, I thought it was so wonderfully written, and gave a great intro for the photographs that followed it. It gives you so much to think about while you are looking at the images.

“the images convey the nocturnal fever, the feverish state of the one who has dreamed, produced, retaken them, seeing them first in the dream of the technological half closed eye of Rimbaud, in the blurring of Kasper Hauser’s magic super-8 or of Herzog’s Fata Morgana. Night, kingdom of the subjective of the arbitrary, of the darkness, to imagine or to fill, becomes a hallucination of objectivity and of precision.” (p.vi) Enrico Ghezzi

“if we are aware of the process, then we know why Barbieri’s pictures in the night strike us so strongly, well beyond the suspicion of a technical artifice, of a recoloration, of a trickery of “edition”. Adopting time as a set, in the already expanded and deserted dimension of the night, the pictures manage to give time itself in the image of the night, a before, a during, and an after of the light. Nothing moves because it is time that moves.” (p. vi-vii)

Barbieri, Olivo, and Enrico Ghezzi. Artificial Illuminations. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1998. Print.

I chose this topic because it has a lot to do with what I am interested in exploring right now in my work. When I googled nocturnal photography, there were a bunch of interesting sites and groups online that deal with the style. I plan on investigating them more in depth as the semester goes on. After reading Ghezzi's introduction, it got me thinking about working with getting all the light out of a scene as possible. Long exposures, stopping the camera way down so they are even longer. I wonder what could happen with that? It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Image from: http://complicatedthings.wordpress.com/tag/nocturnal/