The Colour of Darkness
On artificial light, darkness and unexpected colour
Coming from film, I photograph in digital almost exclusively for black and white, reducing a scene to light, shadow, shape and texture. At night, monochrome allows darkness to become a substantial part of the photograph; things fade, edges become uncertain, and small pools of illumination are enough to describe a street.
These photographs from Skopje have made me question that habit.
Walking through the city at night, from the brighter centre and into quieter residential and semi-industrial streets, into the kinds of places I like. Back streets, anonymous buildings, shuttered premises, parked cars and spaces that all seem abandoned. There is very little happening, which suits my phobia of photographing people. Occasionally there is evidence of use, but mostly the photographs are about the spaces between activity.
What caught my attention during a recent editing session was the light, particularly its inconsistent character.
Cities at night are illuminated by a strange mixture of technologies. Older sodium and warmer street lighting survives alongside much colder LEDs; fluorescent and other artificial sources spill from shop windows and doorways. They don’t necessarily agree with one another. One part of a street can be yellow or amber, another almost white. Light that is designed simply to make a street usable becomes a kind of accidental palette.
The imperfection of this light that appeals to me. It isn’t carefully balanced illumination of an architectural photograph, nor the spectacular neon often associated with night photography. It is functional, uneven and sometimes ugly. Different colour temperatures collide, yet those imperfections give the streets and places their character.
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Sticking to my rigid dogma that monochrome is best, I would interpret all of this into shades of grey. Bright lamps would become white, the road beneath them a middle grey and the surrounding buildings would gradually disappear into black.
The colour isn’t decoration. It describes the source of the light.
Although I’m not interested in making colourful photographs for their own sake (maybe apart from a bokeh experiment with a vintage lens), this is now interesting to me.
Our eyes are good at compensating for changes in colour temperature. Standing in a street, we quickly begin to regard the light as simply “white”. A camera is less forgiving. It records the competing colours, sometimes revealing relationships that weren’t immediately obvious when the photograph was made. Rather than correcting all of those differences afterwards, I have started to wonder whether I should let them stay.
Perhaps that is where I see a possible change of direction for me.
The subject matter hasn’t really changed. I am still interested in empty streets, buildings after dark, traces of human presence and those moments when a place seems to be waiting for something to happen. Darkness still occupies much of the frame. In fact, I think it is important that these remain dark photographs rather than photographs simply made at night. Large areas are allowed to contain very little information, so that the isolated patches of artificial light become more significant.
What has changed is my willingness to let colour participate in that darkness.
I’m not abandoning black and white. After so many years, it is too deeply embedded in how I see, and there are things monochrome can do that colour simply cannot. But this has made me curious about another possibility, where photographs in which colour is restrained rather than removed, and where the peculiar mixture of sodium, LED, fluorescent light and whatever else happens to illuminate the street becomes part of the character of the place.
It feels less like leaving black and white behind than discovering something I have just been discarding through habit.
And for the moment, that seems worth exploring.
