Dark camera action: new photography book expands our understanding of the night

Attempting to capture the endless possibilities of the night, the curator Shanay Jhaveri has compiled Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark (2024), a new book of photography and essays on lens based art produced after sunset (published by Koenig Books; £34).

The anthology spans various geographies, periods and timeframes, and includes portfolios by Malick Sidibé, Ming Smith and Sohrab Hura. It covers important world events, such as David Goldblatt’s photographs of the movement of workers in apartheid South Africa, or Mosa’ab Elshamy’s images from Tahrir Square in Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, while also exploring quieter moments that often overshadowed by larger histories. Jhaveri—a self-described "nightwalker"—discusses how, and why, the book came to be.

The Art Newspaper: How did you arrive at the night as a subject? Were there any exhibitions or anthologies that acted as points of reference for Night Fever? How does the book contribute to those conversations?

Shanay Jhaveri: "The initial concept for this project began in around 2020, when I was an associate curator of international art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and was developing ideas for doing a cross-historical exhibition that was thematic.

One of the ideas was to engage with the night as a subject. As I was doing research, much of it centered around the incredible achievements of artists, filmmakers, photographers to have made work at night (with a focus on technique). Then there was another set of works or writing on the night as a space for rest, the dreamscape, the subconscious.

In terms of references, the Met’s 2011 collection show Night Vision: Photography After Dark and a 1996 exhibition at the Cartier Foundation By Night acted as points of orientation, as did Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s book Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light, (1893). What I found was that there hadn't been a grappling with the idea of an embodied experience of the night: how we get through the night, and how that has changed or continues to change as we move deeper into a late capitalist, neoliberal, and global space.

In Chris Fujiwara's essay, included in the book, he writes about the idea of 1960 as this pivotal year in which the relationship between cinema and the night changed. This perspective became the focal point from which we began the book. Additionally, I aimed to broaden the scope of the subject matter beyond its initial focus on a specific group of practitioners, making it more globally inclusive."

Ōshima Nagisa’s quote from Fujiwara’s essay about the potential of a “continuity in discontinuity” speaks well to the way the book is visually laid out: there’s no preface or introduction. Instead the reader is thrown right into Myriam Boulos’ arresting images in Beirut. Why did you decide to not to lay out the book chronologically?

"The designers, Andrew Shurtz and Sebastian Campos, were given a brief to think about how we can build a book that embodies the idea of walking at night, and how that feels. I was very clear that we wouldn't have a content page right up front, which typically acts like a map, because when you're in the night, sometimes you have to work it out. I wanted readers to be active participants and make them think about how we make our way through the night.

The night can be about discovery and discontinuity, or even coming up against a dead end. It can be frustrating, it can be revelatory. It can be exciting. So wherever a reader opens the book, I wanted to elicit a feeling of: 'Where am I? What am I doing? What am I?'. But it does follow the arc of a night. You start with Myriam Boulos’s incredible images of people getting ready and going out, and then you end with the moon setting in Suwon Lee's photographs and Martina Mullaney’s images of shared mattresses, which is so poignant and moving."

The night can be distinctly gendered, or influenced by one’s socioeconomic status and class—deciding who sleeps, who works, and who celebrates. How did you address the implicit questions and power dynamics surrounding access to and within nocturnal spaces?

"This idea of access and of a power dynamic and how it varies in different geographies was definitely one of the challenges of making the selection for this book.

I also wanted to represent how this access, and the norms and acceptance of certain types of work has evolved. I raise the concern of a night as a gendered space in my introduction by talking of Rut Blees Luxemburg, who has dedicated her career to shooting at night. It’s also addressed in essays by Erika Balsam and Genevieve Yue about night work and the labouring conditions that lead to a sense of community and solidarity. Women and marginalised groups are vulnerable and have to be resilient in the daytime, but the night allows for a space which is not as stratified or hierarchised as the conventions of the day.

In William Gedny’s words, ‘no one is familiar with the night.’ It is not a space that only accommodates a particular group of people. Everybody is making their way through it. So the notion of accessibility and power and who this space is for is one that the book really questions."

This brings us neatly to our last question: what do you want people to walk away with, what possibilities of the night?

"The night is an inexhaustible subject, so I don't want anybody to think that this book is definitive. The most crucial thing for me is that people realise that the night is different for everyone, and particularly how its conception changes around questions of productivity, ideas of labour, and questions of access. It has different tenors, valances and textures for people, groups, communities in different geographies. I also want to put forth the idea of the night as metaphorical, to be thought of not just temporally, as a part of a 24 hour cycle, but an extended notion of the night thought through a consciousness which is both social and political."