For eight years from 2007, Dhruv Malhotra photographed after dark in Indian cities and suburbs. He was, he says, drawn to “the silence, the palpable sense of time and the unknown” as well as the chance “to make visible what is ordinarily dark and hidden”. To begin with, these scenes were uninhabited. He liked the idea of places on the edges of the urban, left alone overnight, waiting to wake again. To achieve his effects he exposed colour negative film over long periods, imprinting otherworldly early hours on film.
About a year into these insomniac studies he took a picture of a night sleeper he chanced upon. Malhotra was living and working mostly in Noida, the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority, a satellite zone of Delhi, which has expanded rapidly since it was created in 1976. After that first picture of the sleeper he made a series, going in search of where people might bed down, staking out likely benches and shelters. Mostly the people he photographed were not homeless. Summers are stifling hot in Uttar Pradesh, and sleeping outside is a regular custom. Some were migrant workers who chose to sleep close to their place of work, others were security guards between shifts. “When photographing,” Malhotra has said of the series, “I’m looking for spaces where the human figure and the urban environment form a symmetry with each other.”
This picture is emblematic of that nocturnal series. It is included in a large-scale book, Night Fever, which focuses on photography and cinema set in the moments when the world is fast asleep. As with other work in the book, Malhotra’s pictures convey the heightened sensory awareness that daylight tends to extinguish; his sleepers, lost to the world, have what he calls “the sense of disquiet that otherwise would go unnoticed”.
Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, edited by Shanay Jhavari, is published on 1 June by Koenig Books
