Nightscapes

I started photographing exclusively at night just over 20 years ago, at a time of enduring emotional tumult after being on deck for serious family illness. Returning to the relentless pace of journalistic shooting I had been doing for ten years prior felt completely impossible. In truth, photographing at all felt completely impossible. I well remember visiting friends in Dallas during that period and musing over lunch that maybe I could go into skyscraper window cleaning because I did love clean glass. Supportive in that way that only your oldest friends are, they nodded sagely and said, “Clean glass is good.”

I picked up a camera again two years later. It was an old Polaroid camera, and I loaded it with laughably out-of-date film. My partner and I headed out to a coffee shop, where she was going to read the paper over a cup of coffee, and I might take a picture over a cup of coffee. Turns out I did take a picture, and I liked both the picture and the process. Some time later, over a different cup of coffee at a wedding reception, I was delighted to be seated at the same table as Durham novelist Elizabeth Brownrigg. We discovered a mutual interest in environmental concerns and went on to collaborate on two stories about nocturnal species that were being threatened by light pollution – sea turtle hatchlings and bats.

In terms of my personal artwork, the way back to making more pictures was through a similarly esoteric method as using an ancient Polaroid camera. That is, I brought out of storage my SuperGraflex 4x5 mid-century bellows film camera. After the bat and sea turtle stories, I found that I had no interest in taking a picture in the daytime. Like them, night was my habitat now. I’ve seen it mentioned in all sorts of places and in all sorts of ways since that time — the quiet and dark of night is when the efficiency, ambition, logic, and stress of the daytime world fades. The swirl of all those emotions of all those people throughout the day seems to fall to earth. For certain people, night feels like the clean air after a rainstorm. For decades, that was me. I casually talked about “the tyranny of the daytime people.” Now when I awake sometimes at 5 a.m. I enjoy the novelty of watching dawn come, but back then, when I was out at night shooting, the light blue of the sky signaling the coming of day was a horror. A strong word, I realize, but I distinctly remember that feeling, like being stalked by an apex predator.

Part of the awfulness of day was that, because of the camera I was employing, I was sometimes able to photograph only 3 scenes total over the course of the night and so dawn was the relentless enforcer, announcing “playtime’s over.” Though my exposures initially began in the “minutes” range, especially if I was employing some kind of added light (a bike light was a favorite for a while) soon I went completely off-grid – sometimes having a camera look at a scene lit only by moonlight for 40 minutes (Outside Amarillo ) or be in almost total darkness in my home kitchen for 3 hours (Dark Dill).

What I came to appreciate over the course of this type of photographing was that just as I was slowing down the exposure, I was slowing down myself as well. At this stage of modernity, with our widespread and often thoughtless night lighting, spending time in the quiet and dark, in an anticipatory and receptive state, is increasingly a boutique and privileged experience. For a great majority of the world’s population, their evolutionary birthright of experiencing the awe of a night sky or the solace of enveloping and velvety blackness is gone. Darkness is only ever dim, the intrusion of human enterprise inescapable.

While a moonlit prehistoric quoit in Cornwall and a dimly illuminated botanical study in Durham would seem to have little in common, the focused attention they inspire is, in fact, quite similar. Long looking and the resultant long exposures produce a kind of intermediate photographic reality that is not available in real time. I experience most of my subjects as dark and undifferentiated monochromes, but when I’m lucky, the alchemy of photography turns them into luscious and detailed scenes that invite immersion and contemplation.

My Fulbright year in Cornwall photographing ancient ruins at night

A vanishingly small percentage of our evolutionary time as human beings has been spent in artificial light. For a large percentage of the world’s population, the experience of night is quickly becoming a boutique and privileged one. When we are robbed of night—from seeing the night sky that fueled the world’s mythologies to experiencing our own creaturely human adaptation to the dark— what are we missing? I was on a 2021/2022 Fulbright Scholar Award to collaborate with nocturnal ecologist Professor Kevin Gaston at the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter, Cornwall to try to answer that question.

Cornwall is remarkable both for its concentration of prehistoric sites and for its dark skies. Archeological evidence from some megaliths (Trethevy Quoit, for example) suggests that people were visiting these sites in liminal light or at night. As they are literally prehistoric, we can only guess  at their meaning for the people who created them. Dr. Andy Jones of the Cornwall Archaeological Unit helped me understand the enormous labor that would have been required from the entire community to move and erect these stones. He also emphasized their keen design sense in, for example, strategically selecting granite megaliths that had seams of reflective quartz running through them and placing them in the landscape in very intentional ways.  Cornwall-based archaeoastronomer Carolyn Kennett was also terrifically generous with her scholarship and introduced me to the ways that some of these sites likely related to the night sky.

While pursuing a Fulbright in Cornwall was motivated by the way our communal experience of darkness and night is being blotted out by exponentially increasing light pollution, I discovered something else while I was there. Spending time at these sites, with the landscape stretching out before me and the night sky above, it was quite clear that, like every other species on earth, humans belong to the land. Our ability to circumvent that with our modern technologies may be helping us in some ways, but it is leaving us incalculably poorer in others.

Being in a landscape, in darkness, with a cathedral of stars overhead…..that is an increasingly boutique and privileged experience for a lot of the world’s people. While it’s beyond my scope to  address how to reclaim our relationship to the land, I can point folks interested in reclaiming the dark to an excellent worldwide community of dedicated advocates. Join us!

darksky.org

Let me start by saying how much I appreciate being able to bring my 5x6 foot “studio copy” of the Dark Dill still life out to play for this exhibit. I often live with a big proof of something for months or years before I know how it wants to be printed, and it’s a real kick for me to be able to share that experience of process with you here in the gallery space.

Similarly, the photographs of prehistoric ruins in Cornwall are ones I am just beginning to proof. Originally created during a Fulbright Scholar year in the UK, up until now they’ve been exhibited only as massive projections in dark spaces — first at the Fruit in Durham during the Click! Photography Festival of 2023 and then at the College of Wooster Art Museum in 2024, where they showed just one image per day in their darkened main gallery, which was lit only by navigational red lights on the floor. Some of these images will also be projected this March as part of Cary’s GLOW festival. I’ve gotten to know every last detail of them as projections of light. It’s been a real pleasure to begin experimenting with them as lasting objects in the form of physical photographs.

Speaking of photographic prints, there are a few varieties on view. Outside Amarillo, for example, is a digital C-print from 2012. Digital C-prints are color darkroom paper prints, whether exposed by the light of a traditional enlarger or by laser light writing the image file onto the paper in a literal dark room, after which they go through the traditional wet paper chemicals. Pigment prints are, as the name implies, pigmented ink laid down on paper via a professional inkjet printer.

Printing technologies are ever-changing. Even though for this moment I have control over the variables in my printing, it is only for this moment.  My current workflow — the printer, the inks, the papers, and the software and hardware that drives them all can change on a dime. Just when you’ve got everything the way you want it in this game of 5-dimensional Star Trek chess, something stops being made or supported. Think cell phones. It’s impossible to just keep them the way you like them. iPhone updates keep coming, whether you want them or not, and they inevitably cause mayhem in what had been up to that point a smooth and reliable system. Printing is like that too. These “First Printing” photographic editions represent the finely-honed system I’ve got going at this moment in 2025.

I realize it was ever thus. Back when I was a young pup of a photographer, there was a gorgeous black and white printing paper, with creamy whites and rich deep blacks. I bought exactly one pack of this glorious confection (Ektalure, for my fellow photo nerds) thinking it would be my new go-to paper for very important prints. It became increasingly difficult to find until it just disappeared completely. My favorite long-exposure color negative film (Fuji NPL) was discontinued over a decade ago, and I’m still always on eBay to see if some retiring photographer is clearing out their freezer and has a stash of 4x5 or 8x10 sheets of it.

I guess I say all that to say that in my long experience with printing photographs, you can never circle back to something you did before. Not really. So you make some beautiful prints while you can, and the next time you make beautiful prints, guaranteed it will be by some slightly different method with a slightly different final result. Onward!