Between Lights 02

Some evenings, light does not simply fade, but stages a prolonged and rather overt disagreement with the sky. It gathers beneath dark clouds, turns the horizon briefly incandescent, and catches trees, poles, signs, and traffic lights in silhouette, reducing the neighborhood to a thin apparatus of outlines and interruptions.

For a few minutes, ordinary infrastructure acquires an unlikely dignity, probably because the light conceals the atrocities we routinely inflict upon it: street lamps reach into illuminated weather, commercial signage becomes an accidental, yet entirely appropriate, caption, and a familiar boulevard appears to lead somewhere considerably less routine than usual, by a route stranger and more convoluted than it has any right to be.

The same roads, buildings, wires, and trees will remain once the display is over, so nothing in these scenes has actually changed. But between daylight and artificial light, the city briefly loses its usual proportions and becomes almost equal to the sky above it, if not outright set against it.

These three images record that temporary imbalance: the neighborhood reduced to a dark edge while light conducts its business elsewhere.