When the Sun Sets: New Book Collates Photographs Taken After Dark
Placing cinematic importance on what happens when the sun sets, new book Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, published by Koenig Books, takes a comprehensive look at the photographic and cinematic works from the 1960s to the present that are set in the night.
Placing cinematic importance on what happens when the sun sets, new book Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, published by Koenig Books, takes a comprehensive look at the photographic and cinematic works from the 1960s to the present that are set in the night.
Ask anyone what their definition of nighttime means and no doubt, you'll receive an infinite amount of answers detailing an infinite amount of possibilities. The thoughts of night are often a secret to many, a contradiction to their own walking daytime perceptions owing in part to the elusive belief that night is a corrective to the demands of a community. It happens to all of us and yet for one reason or another, out of millions of photography books that have been published in the last fifty years, few, if any, have focused on the subject of photography taken 'after dark' - until now.
Published by Koenig Books and edited by Shanay Jhaveri, Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark promises to take a pensive look at a wide array of photographic and cinematic works (1960s - present day) that have used the night as their starting point to carve out a story independent of the time of day. More than just symbolic of when we drift into dreamland, Night Fever acts as a celebration of lens-based practices that have found in the night the opportunity to not only rejoice and rebel, but also to seek rest, refuge and revelation.
Despite the interconnecting theme being the night, not all the works included in Night Fever interpret what could be a rigid subject in the same way. Some use the actual duration of a single night as a structuring principle, its start and end providing the formal parameters for a film or series of photographs, while other featured works are not made in the night at all but instead are meant to evoke the night, or the traces of it, in the following day. The ‘nightwalkers’ - the filmmakers, photographers and artists - who populate Night Fever, also vary as much as their individual interpretations of the theme, including Malick Sidibe, David Goldbatt, Gaspar Noé and Mike Leigh among many more.
Taking inspiration from Djuna Barnes' 1936 novel Nightwood which includes the line, 'The nights of one period are not the nights of another. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another', Night Fever's concept is anchored in the idea that no 'collective night' exists: 'for a person, place or group, night’s threshold, its liminal edge, is ever-changing, dependent not only on the actual conditions of light and dark, but also on the tenor of the socio-political environment', notes the press release. In a nutshell, yes, nighttime is for sleeping. But it's also for many other experiences, where people can feel joy, ecstasy, pain, fear, anxiety, mystery, tedium, inertia, exhaustion, peace and, most of all, solitude. The thoughts of night may sound weird to those who think they know us best but a wandering mind has never been able to travel as far as it has at night, feeling the weight of its boundlessness with no barriers other than your own un-anchored figure, a window open and a fathomless sky.
Night Fever is published by Cornerhouse in the UK and the US on 1 June and 25 June 2024 respectively. Launch events will be held at Barbican in London on 11 July and at Light Industry, New York City, on 20 June.
