The night as seen through the eyes of eleven photographers

This special issue starts at the point when the sun sets over the horizon and night emerges. Through the work of 11 photographers, it explores what the hours between dusk and sunrise can hold.

We begin with revelry, as drag queens step out in full regalia, raccoons cause havoc among the remains of a tea party and lovers cruise through parks in search of anonymous encounters. We explore the hustle of the night market, the anxiety of the isolated mother and the terror of attempting the journey through the dark across the US-Mexico border. We end with the light of the Moon: the peace of watching it descend and the confusion of creatures led astray by city lights.

One question runs through the work of many of the photographers featured here: what can the night allow us to be, and to see, that we otherwise do not?

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Night life

Lia Darjes

Plates I-XXXI, 2020-24

There are wild animals that seek the neighbourhood of humans. You could see them as part of our society — if you wanted to. They live with and near us.

When a blackbird sings outside my window today, it’s a new thing: their ancestors only arrived in cities in the 19th century; before that the blackbird was a shy forest bird. City pigeons, on the other hand, come from man-made dovecotes, and because they always return to their birthplace, they now characterise entire cityscapes. In 1945, about two dozen raccoons escaped from a fur farm in Brandenburg in north-east Germany. The region’s growing raccoon population (some would say plague) is said to have resulted from this escape. Since then, they have been making residents’ gardens and front yards unsafe: raccoons are skilful predators. While biodiversity is generally declining, few species are able to escape into the human habitat and use the advantages of the settlement area for themselves. These animals, also known as “synanthrope”, fascinate people and stimulate their imagination. In cultural history, they are often the animals that are humanised. In Cinderella, for example, it is the doves that announce there is blood in the shoe. I am interested in this relationship.

For my work “Plates I-XXXI”, I invite myself to eat and drink in the gardens and on the terraces of my friends. The place settings on the garden tables gradually become the basis of a still life through my intervention. After I have left, a camera remains behind as a passive observer for a few hours or whole days and nights. It is triggered by the presence of the animals. By doing so, I create images that are not clearly a scene or a still life. I find it fascinating to combine the staged and the random in one image. “Plates I-XXXI” is a semi-documentary still life study dedicated to the grey area between the habitats of humans and wild animals.

Text by Lia Darjes. “Plates I-XXXI” is published by Chose Commune

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Kohei Yoshiyuki

The Park, 1970s

Before Kohei Yoshiyuki took his Canon 7 into the parks of Tokyo in the 1970s, voyeurism had existed in Japanese art for centuries, as in the sexually charged literary works of Junichiro Tanizaki or in the seemingly straightforward erotic woodblock prints of Ukiyo‑e. But when stealth photographic equipment for military surveillance became available, Yoshiyuki seized the opportunity to transform illicit activities usually performed in the dark into poignant visual records.

In 1980 the photographs were published as a magazine, and threw open a window on to how the Japanese saw themselves. They were both shocked and intrigued. All 100,000 copies of the magazine were immediately sold.

Text by Yossi Milo, excerpted from “The Park” by Kohei Yoshiyuki, published by Radius Books

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Roxy Lee

2018-24

Roxy Lee began photographing the nightlife scene in London while she was working at queer pub The Glory in Hackney. “I started to be around people who presented themselves in a way that really, really excited me,” she says of the partygoers, drag queens and go-go dancers who frequented the pub. “I just had this buffet of amazing people around me, visually, humorously, sexually. I didn’t want to forget what that was.” She started photographing them out and about, creating her own kind of “family photo album”.

She always works against the backdrop of the night. “There’s more permission in the darkness to look how you want to look,” she says. “I find the night time, when the sun sets, so fascinating because human beings just seem to change their physical language. When you feel fab and you’re around other people that feel fab, surely that’s the most inspiring time of the day?”

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Duane Michals

René Magritte Asleep, 1965

If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of René Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumption about photography.

What had so engaged me in Magritte’s work was its ability to perplex. In his world, I could not be sure of anything. Giant roses filled entire rooms, the moon lit up a starry sky at midday and nightgowns could display real woman’s breasts. In his paintings he presented such amusing but serious ideas. I was freed from just looking.

I was particularly interested in seeing Magritte’s studio and at first walked through it without recognising it. It was a small room off the bedroom with a green sofa, a comfortable chair and some bookcases. Everything was in order, with the silent easel and palette being the only clues to what went on there. They looked like “smart” touches by a bad decorator. Although I never saw him paint, I suspected that he could be found at his easel dressed in the suit and tie he always wore.

Excerpted from “A Visit with Magritte” by Duane Michals

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Night shift

Ken Light

Midnight La Frontera, 1983-87

The summer air was stifling as I sat in the passenger side of the Border Patrol’s Ram Charger. It was the early morning and the landscape was barely visible in the deep darkness of the Otay Mesa. As the radio crackled in the background with calls like “10-16, ‘pick up aliens in custody,’” the agent responded to the call “10-60, ‘a sensor hit,’” signalling there might be a group of “illegal aliens” moving across the landscape. We drove quickly, feeling every rut and hole in the road and kicking up a storm of dust behind us. The agent at the wheel, his eyes peering into the darkness, checked out “Razor Back”, “E-2”, “Dillon Canyon” and the “China Inn Tube” — just some of the locations where he suspected illegal border crossers could be found hiding or weaving across the barren terrain along the US-Mexico border.

Between 1983 and 1987 I took my Hasselblad camera with a flash and rode along with US Border Patrol agents as they combed “the Line”, capturing undocumented immigrants. Night after night, from four in the afternoon until seven in the morning, I photographed the drama of the border, as people desperately tried to cross into the United States. They were looking for a safe harbour where they could be treated with civility and create a new life in the Land of the Free.

The photographs captured extreme vulnerability, fear and desperation, as hope gave way to despair. My photographs bore witness to the inhumane treatment there. It is so unsettling to see the same emotional pain now as a new generation of photographers respond to the even harsher practices of the 21st century at the border. We, as a country, have not yet successfully faced our lack of humanity towards immigrants.

Text by Ken Light, excerpted from “Midnight La Frontera”, published by TBW Books

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The Jaguar’s Path by José Ángel Navejas

My life in the shadows began some 20 years ago. It was a hot April night in Tijuana, that border siren that lures both migrant and tourist with promises of boundless prosperity and unchecked lust. That night I joined a numerous army, an anonymous army. Under the infinite depth of night and guided by a sneaky coyote, we moved, slowly descending the slopes flattened nightly by the illicit weight of millions of other shadows who preceded us. Denied a legitimate chance at the American Dream, what better way to attain it than by penetrating America by night?

The stretch between Tijuana and San Diego is long. Very long. And it is as treacherous as it is beautiful. It is unlikely that anybody who has ever crossed it will easily forget it. Its desertlike landscape is bound to carve itself equally onto body and soul. Once this turf is trodden, the tiredness, the awe, and the terror experienced along these trails become permanent memories. Some take away a cactus scratch that eventually scars. Others momentarily succumb to the sheer magnitude of the heavens, the number of stars, the depth of night. A few are left behind to join the landscape.

We go up and down hills that never seem to end. At some point, running upward along a narrow path, I look down the cliff to my right and feel nauseated. It is a long, rocky fall. All it would take for my journey to be over would be a momentary distraction, a trip on a rock, a slip, someone accidentally bumping me from behind. How many dreams have ended like this, way down there?

Excerpted from “Midnight La Frontera” by Ken Light, published by TBW Books

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Amak Mahmoodian

One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, 2019-23

Born one year after the Iranian revolution of 1979, Amak Mahmoodian was a child when many of her family members were imprisoned and she and her family were sent into exile in the mountains bordering the Caspian Sea. Years later, after coming to the UK to finish her PhD in photography, she too was exiled from her place of birth due to her family’s history.

“I haven’t been in my homeland for 14 years,” she says. Being separated from her family, she began to notice that “very often they come to visit me in my dreams”.

One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, named for the amount of time we tend to dream each night, is the result of years of research into the dreams of people in exile. Working with 16 exiled people who now live in the UK, Mahmoodian explored the visual and psychological spaces they went to in their dreams, creating sketchbook drawings and photography exploring what each person told her.

“Dreams don’t have any borders,” she says of her desire to make the project. “You can be wherever you want. As soon as you close your eyes, you create your own world. That is your private world, and nobody can come in.”

“One Hundred and Twenty Minutes” by Amak Mahmoodian will be exhibited as part of Bristol Photo Festival, October 2024

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Phalonne Pierre Louis

Port-au-Prince by Night, 2020-23

This series was made between 9pm and 2am in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I started working on it in 2020, at a time when the city was plagued by violence due to political instability. Not a day went by without a case of kidnapping or murder. The kidnappers operated in the morning and the afternoon, so I didn’t go out on to the streets during the day unless I had a job to do. But there were very few late-night kidnappings, and so I got into the habit of going out with friends after dark.

There I discovered the beauty of the city at night. When dark falls, lots of people go out on the streets. With my camera, I criss-crossed the city and tried to capture its movement. I photographed the merchants at the local market, people sitting in bars or restaurants, a street lamp, a burning tyre, or a fish being smoked on a barbecue. The photographs show the city from another angle. At night, you can see smiles on people’s faces.

Text by Phalonne Pierre Louis

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Scarlett Carlos Clarke

The Smell of Calpol on a Warm Summer’s Night, 2017-20

Scarlett Carlos Clarke was walking along the seafront wheeling her newborn baby in a pushchair, looking in through people’s windows as she passed, when she conceived the idea for this project. She began casting around for locations and props that would help her create the close, sticky atmosphere of a summer’s evening spent at home, often with a child, in the cold blue glow of the television.

“I knew I wanted it to feel hot but the opposite of what you think when you imagine summer,” says Clarke. “The characters are static but sweating, there’s no sunset or natural light. It’s stuffy, suffocating and airless.”

The resulting tableaux, which she frames like paintings, almost force the viewer into the room with the characters. They evoke the claustrophobia of being inside a domestic space for hours, as day changes to night. “It’s very direct — it’s confrontational,” Clarke says. “For a moment you get sucked in.”

“The Smell of Calpol on a Warm Summer’s Night” by Scarlett Carlos Clarke. Published by MÖREL, September 2024

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Night light

Mattia Balsamini

Protege Noctem, 2021-23

For all of us, blinded by the shards from billions of artificial lights (or ALAN: Artificial Light At Night), the night sky has become a soiled canvas, an unknown phenomenon. Eighty-three per cent of the world’s population have never seen the Milky Way. In cities like Shanghai, where the world’s largest astronomy museum recently opened, 95 per cent of the stars are now invisible to the naked eye. Public lighting, windows, street lamps and even LED headlights emit blue spectrum light that dazzles the nocturnal ecosystem and damages the human circadian cycle, our rhythm of sleep and wakefulness, promoting the onset of diseases such as breast and prostate cancer, diabetes and depression. Epidemiologists are united in considering the disappearance of the night as a risk factor on a level footing with pollution, alcohol and smoking.

It’s not only light on Earth but also in space: the proliferation of telecommunication satellites creates false cosmic streaks that prevent astronomers from studying the stars. Natural life appears to have been harshly affected: migratory birds veer off course, plants no longer sense the onset of winter and many insects face extinction.

This is why defending the darkness represents the vanguard in the ongoing ecological battle. This series of photographs chronicles the unofficial alliance between scientists and citizens to counter the disappearance of the night and its creatures. The project took two years of research and was photographed across Europe, the Canary Islands and Asia.

Text by Raffaele Panizza, excerpted from “Protege Noctem” by Mattia Balsamini and Raffaele Panizza, published by Witty Books

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Tim Hetherington

Vital Structures, 2008

These images reflect my mental and physical wanderings in Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. Centred loosely on the motif of architecture, I tried to find some common ground between the two countries that might not be found in a guidebook. Normally I work on long-term projects that seek a degree of intimacy and involvement with the subject. But since I spoke no Arabic, I had to employ an alternative strategy and started thinking of Walker Evans and his vernacular approach. The result took on the form of a photographic survey, examining the way that architecture can transform the harsh Arabian environment and harness important resources. There are stark differences between what Yemen was and what the UAE has become. Yet for all the UAE’s perceived glamour or Yemen’s celebrated heritage, I found myself strangely drawn to everyday structures that verged on the banal and yet were rich in those details of daily life that go some way to express a sense of indigenous national character.

Text by Tim Hetherington. © British Council Collection

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Suwon Lee

Moonset, 2013

To create Moonset, Suwon Lee defied the notion of productive time. Sitting, waiting and observing, she spent the stretch of the night’s end (or the morning’s beginning) photographing a gibbous Moon, one that is between half full and full, as it set into the horizon, its waning glow reflecting off the North Atlantic Ocean below.

Lee took the photographs in 2013, when she was passing through the volcanic oceanic island of La Palma, off the coast of north-western Africa. She was returning to her native Venezuela from Iceland, where she had been experimenting with photographs of the Sun and its light, a focal point of her artistic practice since the mid-2000s. In the 18 photos that comprise Moonset, the sun remains a spectral presence. Both reflections appear on the surface of the sea, puncturing the all-encompassing darkness. In capturing these phases, Lee enacts a process of measuring through the Moon’s cycles.

Text adapted from “The Measure of the Moon” by Madeline Murphy Turner and originally published in “Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark”, edited by Shanay Jhaveri (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2024)

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