[in progress]
timeline: 2015 – 2025 | locations photographed: 38
“Darkness is not empty. It’s information at rest.” – Teju Cole, Blind Spot
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STATEMENT
In 2011 I completed a project documenting nocturnal adventures when I was away from home. I was drawn to the way darkness obscured the landscape; merely hinting at what might be beyond the lens. In 2015 while in Morocco, I started working with night photography again. The windy paths of the medina are disorienting enough in the daytime, but once night falls, it’s nearly impossible to find your way. Months later in rural Costa Rica, I was again inspired to shoot in the darkness; this time drawn to how vast the landscape felt. I returned home with a desire to work on this series for ten years on six continents before publishing a book of the work.
Since then I’ve continued to shoot at night whenever possible. I’ve photographed 38 different locations on three continents. In March 2019, I photographed in Ireland and Northern Ireland. As Brexit talks loomed, I thought about borders. My train crossed from Ireland into UK without me realizing it; a privilege that might have been revoked if a hard border was placed between the two countries. I became interested in rejecting the socio-political construction of borders and thus, images are identified purely by the longitude/latitude coordinates (and exposure number).
In her novel What We Lose, Zinzi Clemmons writes “I thought about how similar Johannesburg looked to where I lived. Save for the occasional pedestrian walking on the side of the highway, we could have been in New York or Los Angeles. I thought about how every place on Earth contained its tragedies, love stories, people surviving and others falling, and for this reason, from far enough of a distance and under enough darkness, they were all essentially the same.” I think back to this quote often while exploring and documenting nightscapes. Under the abstraction of darkness, landscapes begin to come together. Borders become irrelevant and instead we are presented with a poetic examination of light and shadow. Under the uniformity of the monochrome darkness, these images provide a space for questioning our understanding of the world around us, for examining the complexities of our cultural differences as well as our universal human commonalities, and for observing slight changes in perception.
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PRESS
~ The Washington Post (2019)
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COLLECTIONS
~ Montgomery County Public Art Trust, Silver Spring, MD