American Night

The word Photography derives from the Greek “photo-” (φως), “light,” and “-graphia” (γραφή), meaning “writing” or “drawing” with light. Since its invention, the endeavor of photographers has been to capture light and the landscape in the right light, usually in daylight. In my night photographs, I am interested in a reversal of photography’s traditional approach.  By using the camera to capture the night light, I am using the darkness to reveal formal elements of the landscape that are less clear in the light of day. It is similar to lighting a scene of a film, except the light in my photographs is the available light that I work with for each exposure. The light found usually under the street lights, or the light of the moon in the countryside and at some instances lightning storm themselves, all these have all been sources of light in my photographs. 

I was inspired to explore low light photography after having seen an exhibition of the work by Bill Brandt, at MOMA in New York. I was particularly impressed by the photographs that he took during the WWII blackouts in London. Despite the fact that these were shot often with the moonlight as the only source of light, there is rich detail in these images. This idea captured my imagination.  

American Night began in the late 1990’s. I used to share a studio with two painters in the Ironbound district of Newark in New Jersey. We all lived back then in the not yet gentrified Manhattan areas. Yet Newark was the only place we could afford to have studios and that was also where I had set up a darkroom. For me Newark was a revelation. Few of these old factories were still operating. Most had shut down and what remained of them was their abandoned skeletons and ruins. But I soon realized that by walking around Newark’s industrial zones, I was actually looking back in time. Operating or not, these factories and industrial streets seemed to have been untouched for a very long time, preserving their architectural character of another era. 

I started wandering at night in Newark, with a 6x6 Rolleiflex mounted on a tripod, photographing with a feeling of wonder at the beauty these sites acquired under the light of the moon and of the streetlights. The photographic process, long exposures on film, allowed for a contemplative relationship with the subject. 

I continued photographing as I traveled across the US. I found landscapes whose emptiness concealed a very particular beauty and at the same time starkness and loneliness. The old factories, long abandoned, stood always as a reminder of the post WWII economic boom. There was something very grand about them as I saw them then in Newark right before being demolished in order to make room for a sports stadium. They were magnificent structures, monuments to an era long gone.  

I came across suburban streets with houses that looked as if they were faces sleeping in the summer night surrounded by stillness and silence, the loneliness always present. 

A Drive-In megaplex of 13 screens in Florida was something I never anticipated to photograph. There on the screens and against the cloudy sky, I recorded images in an improvisational process, what would the open shutter record after 20 or 30 seconds? Later as I developed the film in my New York bathroom I was very pleasantly surprised. There were abstract shapes and forms and then suddenly faces barely appearing and disappearing into the gray cloud-like texture of the overexposed screens. 

I have continued to photograph at night with the same camera in Europe, but the new photographs feel different. Photographing the American night, in a literal and symbolic way, was also about me discovering that landscape, having at the time recently immigrated to the US. There are elements of what is referred to as Americana in this body of work, cultural imagery and artifacts from the 40's and 50's. Also billboards where violence is far from concealed. This gives Night Light the "skeleton" around which I have elaborated the narrative of this night journey.