Night

It's just not possible to discuss night photography without first considering the Night Hawks by Edward Hopper ... and that's exactly where we started at the club this week. Many many pages have been dedicated to studying this vignette of American nightlife ... but not so many people are aware of Martin Lewis, one time teacher of Hopper.

His etchings are full of everything that makes an image at night sucsessful ... the play of light and shadows can give can give the benign the faintest hint of menace ... night can change the mood, it can change your perception of people. You begin to question the interactions and motives of the characters in the scene. It is nightime, yet it is full of light (in all the right places). There are very few people in it but stories are bursting out of the frame. There is just enough there to make us intriguiged ... that means we're engaged ... and that's a win.

We found a write up about fifteen year old exhibition at The Met ... Night Vision, Photography after dark.

Highlights of the Metropolitan's exhibition include classic night photography of the 1930s-1950s by Berenice Abbott, Bill Brandt, Brassaï, Robert Frank, André Kertész, William Klein, Weegee, and Garry Winogrand, as well as three early photographs by Diane Arbus that have never been shown or published before, and recently acquired photographs by Peter Hujar and Kohei Yoshiyuki.

Garry Winograd

So that's where we started ... and whilst some of those photographers, like Brandt, Brassai and Wegee are well know for shooting after dark, the others aren't so we hunted for some of their night time work ... and again, the thing that bound them all together was mood, experimentation and actually, a fair bit of bad weather!

The accompanying image by Garry Winograd has everythg we've just been talking about, a hint of danger, experimentation with camera angles, it looks like the street is covered with dirty snow and most importantly, just like that etching, there are stories leaping out of the photograph!

The last photographer on that list, Kohei Yoshiyuki, shot infrared film, with flash, in Japanese parks in the seventies to photograph clandestine encounters ... and the people that were hanging around to watch! I haven't provided a link because some things, once seen, just can't be unseen ... so if you want to, you can go fishing yourself but don't say I didn't warn you!

Henri Prestes - The Outer Edge

We looked at Henri Prestes whose atmospheric, dare I say cinematic, images are inspired by the likes of Todd Hido and Justine Kurland.

And whilst, mood and atmosphere is very much front and centre, Henri Prestes images are story driven.

The distinct colour grading (green in the shadows) helps to lend a dystopian atmosphere which gives the story another layer.

As well as colour grading, Henri is kown to use the tint slider (underneath the white balance one in Lightroom) to shift the colour throughout the whole image. Interestingly, some of his images with a strong light source have figures without shadows which can make them quite other worldly.

Liam Wong - Memories of Green

We looked at the work of Liam Wong, the Edinburgh native that made it in the video game industry before taking his Blade Runner inspired imagery into the world of photography.

Weather, colour grading and narrative all feature heavily to produce images that transport you into the night ... images that weren't just taken at night, but are 'of' the night ...

His book, To:ky:00 is described as a loveletter to the metropolis that feuled his creativity.

Liam Wong - the image that started his journey into photography

As well as manipulating colours with post processing, Liam also uses coloured gels at times over a flashgun to inject vibrance into the scene. Some of his more austere images are almost monochromatic (green), with a strong area of contrasting colour in the middle of the frame to draw you in.

He can sometimes use several images to layer up into a composite ... this particular one works really well as the colours are well balanced on the colour wheel. Yellow and red always work well with a small hint of blue. The man in the hat somehow manges to convey that same sense of lonliness that you find in the Hopper painting we looked at at the beginning. Another one of Liam's hook ... the see through umbrella, is also used to its full advantage.

We looked at the work of Daniel Laan, his images are composite ... and all about mood and impressions. The landscapes that he portrays also have an other worldlyness to them.

A lot of the images in his Nightscapes and Aurora series have a lot of foreground in them ... there is space for the viewer to move through the image before settling on the intended focus.

Alan Delaney took nocturnal pictures in London and New York, mostly devoid of people ... again, exploring the themes of the lonely, dark city ...

The signs in this one remind me a lot of the work of Fred Herzog in Vancouver ... Fred was very keen on getting a lot of signs in a picture!

Other photographers that came up in discussion were Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter, neither of them particularly well known for taking images at night but when they did ... they nailed it.

One interesting photographer that we didn't quite get round to was Shimon Attie ... his 'Writing on the Wall' project is really worth looking at for an original way to use photographs.