Site Home > Michael Shanks - site 2006 > Night Photography and Concepti...
My ideas for this project have changed over the course of the quarter. I have been interested in learning to take photos at night for a while, and I thought this would be an interesting context in which to explore it. Part of the appeal of night photography is the challenge: photography is based, very fundamentally, on the fixing of images through the recording of light. This makes photography at night a challenge, because there is very little light to record. In this sense, the act of night photography demonstrates the materiality of the camera. By forcing the consideration of the physical processes of photography that it is easy to take for granted on a sunny day, it makes the photographer recognize their construction of the image.
I also think night time is a fascinating subject for photography, because landscapes change between night and day. The way we experience, perceive, and move through a space changes dramatically based on the time of day. For example, consider the Stanford golf course: during the day, golfers traverse its manicured lawns. At night, it is a supposedly empty space; people are not allowed there at night, it is not lit, and, presumably, no one is there. However, for many, it is more accessible once it is dark. If you are not a rich golfer associated with Stanford in some official capacity, you can wander around the premises once it is dark without getting caught; during the day you would be kicked off immediately. The daytime exclusivity makes it less accessible to most than it is as a place for nighttime walks.
Now, I am interested in exploring a different aspect of night photography: the actual depiction of time and presence. I started to think about this as I searched the internet for examples of night photography and realized how few night photos there are with people in them. I think there are a couple of reasons for this absence:
*One is a practical reason: with long shutter speeds, it is hard to photograph people. In fact, with a long enough exposure, one could walk by the camera several times and still not appear in the image.
*The other reason is more theoretical: I think a lot of people conceptually depopulate the nighttime. In the case of the golf course, for instance, people are not supposed to be there at night, so we don't see them. We often photograph what we expect or are used to seeing, and thus are looking for empty night landscapes.
In this sense, night photography and its limitations become a potent metaphor for archaeological problems. Often, it is difficult to see the people in the archaeological record. Like the slow shutter speed that misses short events, archaeology often deals with the long term. The artifacts that we study are not products of one particular moment, frozen in time, but of a long history, including various uses and social histories and post-depositional processes. So how can we learn anything about moments, or the people who were not fixed in the film emulsion? This is a problem every archaeologist must grapple with.
To explore these questions, my project involves photographing people in low light, slow shutter speed situations.
Some of my questions are:
When do people show up, and when are they invisible? What does it mean to capture the moment when the moment is fifteen minutes long, and what is the experience, both for the photographer and the subject?
I started by staging scenes at night that involve people performing activities that are stationary enough that they will not be invisible, but in which they do not have to pose, still, for long periods of time. These include a picnic at the cactus garden and a game of Go at night.
After reading Benjamin, in which he discusses the implications that early slow lenses had on portraiture, I decided to take long-exposure portraits and examine the experience of fixing an image, not only in the photographic sense of recording light on film, but by setting up my shot and essentially creating a moment to record.
There is thus an aspect of performance in this project. I am staging my subjects in an attempt to comment on the absences I see. But in a sense, this construction of a presence merely highlights other absences.