In 2008, the celebrated photographer Dayanita Singh discovered that using daylight colour film stock at night yielded strange results. When she shot at dusk, the photos came out blue. Feeling experimental one night, she decided to leave her camera on a long exposure. The following morning, she woke to discover that she had been robbed. The thieves had taken her cameras and those rolls of exposed colour film from under her bed – with pictures still waiting to be revealed. “Obviously, the camera saw something it should not have seen,” she says.
The photos Singh made next capture the frightening and uncanny sensations this incident triggered. She set about capturing images like a robber might. She wore a headtorch and captured a parrot by its light. She trained her lens on the decorative fluorescent tubes lighting neighbourhood trees and marvelled at the surveillance-footage green they lent her images. The daylight film made indiscernible night colours lurid: the ground turned red, the trees yellow, the sky a galactic indigo.
The perfect night-time shot has long proved elusive for makers of both still and moving images. Even today, cinematographers use day-for-night filters to circumvent the technical challenges of working under the cover of darkness. But the allure of the night far exceeds the limitations of technology, as a new book called Night Fever, edited by the Barbican’s Shanay Jhaveri, reveals. It is full of depictions of the night by artists and film-makers, most of whom have homed in on not what the night looks like but the way it feels.
Night Fever opens with a naked couple making out against a bruised Lebanese sky, and ends with a series of empty beds in a Welsh hostel, the crinkled bedclothes looking strangely lonesome. In between, Jhaveri’s “fellowship of nightwalkers” – a cohort of image makers including Chris Marker, Gaspar Noé, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Derek Jarman and Ming Smith – show their attempts to capture, as he puts it, “how the experience of the night can be represented and communicated and translated”.
There is no single experience of the night. It shifts by time zone and latitude and sociopolitical context. It signals danger as much as it does hedonism. And it doesn’t stop countless people having to go to work – as shown in David Goldblatt’s 1980s documentation of tired rural workers in northern South Africa queuing at bus stops from 2:40am. Darkness, as both the absence of light and the time of day, “is not monolithic, it’s never constant,” Jhaveri says.
During a spate of insomnia, Indian photographer Dhruv Malhotra took to photographing the people sleeping outdoors when his New Delhi neighbourhood went to bed. He’d head out on a rickshaw with his cameras and tripods, a book and a torch. Working with colour negative film and no lighting, his exposure times were sometimes so long his driver would fall asleep.
This slow technique gave a mesmeric depth of colour, the hue accruing over time. The import of what you’re actually looking at in these images also slowly hits you. Those reds and pinks in the sky, Malhotra tells me, are due to pollution. Malhotra’s outdoor sleepers, meanwhile, confound any culturally specific notion that sleep is a private, indoor activity. Where western viewers usually imagine these people to be homeless, Indian viewers recognise them as migrant workers or watchmen catching 40 winks in the cooler night air wherever they can. “The night is as valid a time as the day,” says Malhotra. Using it to record the city was a way of showing spaces and existences that too many see without really seeing.
Around the same time but on different shores, Egyptian photojournalist Mosa’ab Elshamy was making similarly indelible works out of altogether thicker nights. When Tahrir Square filled with people protesting President Hosni Mubarak’s government in 2011, Elshamy was 24. During the 18 days of the uprising – and subsequent two and a half years of street battles, demonstrations and massacres – he became a photographer.
Every night Elshamy showed up to shoot men sitting barefoot on sandbags and black-booted soldiers standing in flower beds. He captured young football ultras weaponising fireworks, the deadly display perfectly reflected in puddles on the ground. “And it didn’t feel like 300 nights or 600 nights, it felt like the same night,” he says. Thirteen years on, Elshamy says that looking back through these images can feel like a dream: “So many of us who witnessed the revolution wonder, did that really happen?”
Loss and fear and finding on every scale permeates much of the work in this book. Sometimes, it’s the dark granting permission to people on the margins of daytime society to just be, such as in Adam’s Apple, Paz Errázuriz’s project portraying transidentifying sex workers during the 1980s Aids crisis. Sometimes, as with Venezuelan artist Suwon Lee’s work, it’s the night sky revealing spaces that locate you in the universe – even when society refuses a clear sense of belonging and identity. Between the moon and the sun, she has sought to find herself – as an artist, as a woman, as the child of a displaced immigrant family.
The Yakutian photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva – who is of the Sakha people of Northern Siberia – tells me that the darkness where she is from comes with colours and shimmers that only the camera knows to seek out. It brings little hushes and great big noises, too. Arctic winds that sound like strings, ice floes that cry like babies. Arbugaeva has repeatedly photographed lighthouse keepers, reindeer herders, scientists and hunters who live through the long polar night. Carrying out such work can make her feel extremely small. “And I really love that feeling,” she says, before describing the night in a way that feels apt for many of these breathtaking images. “It’s so normal to disappear there.”
• Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark 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, London on 11 July and Light Industry, New York City, on 20 June
