Night photography gives us a glimpse of the private lives things have when no one is looking at them. This is a sleeping world of dreams. Yet these images are not about the Self, which for perhaps two centuries has increasingly come to dominate everything. Aided by technology, photographers are able to achieve what one of my friends referred to as "objects stripped of their subjectivity." These are photographs that reflect the collective (not the individual) unconscious and subconscious. It's tempting to say these scenes look dead - that time in them has stopped - but I think these images instead capture time in stasis. This is life when you press the Pause button.
While I mostly avoided the glamorous urban night photos and popular night photos of city skylines, I just could not resist this whopper of the entire Hong Kong skyline - go here.
Image Credit: Jim Downie. Image Source: Smashing Magazine.
Image Source: Alcove.
Image Source: Alcove.
Image Source: Alcove.
Image Source: Alcove.
Linköping, Summer 2005. Image Credit: Gustav Lindh. Image Source: Photo.net.
Image Source: Image Shack.
Sick fearless bastard (30 July 2010, Santiago, Chile). Image Credit: Crazy Ivory. Image Source: Webdesigncore.
Hong Kong on a Summer Night. Image Credit: Stuck in Customs. Image Source: Smashing Downloads.
Moscow at 4 a.m. Image Credit: Nick Sushkevich. Image Source: Richworks.
Very interesting. With their storm clouds and decayed buildings, the urban views from Alcove have a weird scabrous morbid quality about them -- a pack of zombies shuffling down those streets wouldn't look out of place at all.
ReplyDeleteBut that is indeed one fearless moggy!
Yeah, I would find having a cat like that around the house - a tad unnerving.
ReplyDeleteThat cat is bound to be plotting something...
ReplyDeleteThe image of Hong Kong, from that angle, makes it appear to be almost a crystalline structure erupting from the Earth.
@Cyc, Yes, Hong Kong had the nicest urban night shots of the all the urban skylines I saw. So many concentrated highrises makes it unearthly at night, like three times the population density piled up on top of itself. And the cat picture has something equally unearthly about it.
ReplyDelete