The following night, an hour before the blue sunrise, we witnessed another effect: the ocean was becoming phosphorescent. Pools of grey light were rising and falling to the rhythm of invisible waves. Isolated at first, these grey patches quickly spread and joined together, and soon made up a carpet of spectral light extending as far as the eye could see.’

 

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem, Faber and Faber, 2003, pp.190

This publication presents a body of work that I have been developing over the past four years, in the north of England and the United States. It explores the shifts of perception we experience in darkness. What is it that makes our experience of the night so different from that of the day? When we are deprived of visual information our brain starts to compensate for what the eye can’t see, and we begin to occupy an internal, subjective and constructed reality. This intensified space has become the subject matter of my work.

 

When I began work on this publication I was fortunate to encounter the writing of Jean-Paul Curnier. The basis for his essay was a series of conversations in which we discussed the text as much as the work itself. It became clear that the writing needed to complement the photographs rather than describing them. I would like to thank Jean-Paul Curnier for his philosophical observations. They are an equivalent to the photographs, discrete meditations that need not be read in any specific order. In this sense the text too is a series of portraits that have neither beginning nor end.

 

Uta Koegelsberger