unfoto

I do many different so called genres of photography, but there’s a special place in my heart for night photography, for that time when most photographers put away their cameras. The night removes many veils that our society uses to obscure its less “safe” aspects. Without the presence of people, our buildings are revealed for the ridiculous edifice they are. People who society and (especially) police generally see as less desirable or attractive come out of hiding, allowed to be present in the anonymity of darkness. The night provides space for the less typical to exhale.

At first, night photography appealed to me because of its novelty, the prospect of revealing that which the naked eye alone is incapable of seeing. As time has gone on, I learned the above, of the ability of such work to de and recontextualize what we all encounter in everyday experience. The buildings and streets we walk among and on, the people (human and non-human alike) that we do or do not see or notice, the spaces, occupied or not that normally exist beyond our rushed daytime perception.

A formerly unconscious strand of such work of mine has been the need to see solitude in these busy and inhuman (and inhumane, and inanimal for that matter) environments. There is a certain apocalyptic outlook to be seen through my eyes. A place with less human presence, where the collective monolith of our society, out civilization has gone to seed. But there is also a hopeful aspect here, as this new absence creates a void waiting to be filled with the possibility of a new kind of existence that draws from the very, very old, from a time in which humans did not destroy through poisoned relations with the rest of the world.

So these pictures portray not only the dystopia in which we live that is revealed beneath the veneer of rushed daily existence, but also the utopian possibilites that lurk beneath such seemingly unlikely places. I’m not content simply to take pictures, I have an urge to use this capturing of perception to open up a dialogue that prepares us for an uncertain future, while also helping us see the beauty and the ugliness that exists just beneath the mundane surface of the everyday.

Sometimes I wonder if photography is the most effective medium with which to do this. Certainly a precedent has been set in both writing and music for such work that as described above. But photography (or at least my own) must work with what exists and with the narrow scope of narrative available to it compared with those forms. To attempt a dialogue about an uncertain future, and the past that led us to this present, in a medium that can describe only the present is perhaps setting myself up for disappointment. But maybe having to use the reality I see now to portray any of a number of realities I or others can envision for the future will make that portrayal all the more poignant.