Shintaro chose to have his streets devoid of people (Buchanan, 2021) – this was not a choice for me when I went out. Covid-19 had made Rye, normally a bustling place in the post-Christmas period, an empty and silent post apocalyptic town.
‘In empty streets, the excessive colors and lights of neon signs seem deprived of their original purpose of attracting people’
Sato Shintaro – Landscape Stories, 2016/20.
The Christmas lights and warning lights seemed to have lost their purpose when there were no people around to see them and I couldn’t work out if it was defiance of the situation or apathy that led to them still being in place.
The streets photographed in the dark held a mystery that was missing from daylight photos. Artificial lights made interesting and unusual shapes; there were crisper shadows, colour casts and pools of light. The dark obscured objects, masking unsightly things only visible by day or creating secret pockets of gloom.
Who knew that scaffolding could look good? The artificial light here creates interesting patterns with the metal structure and a warm, fiery glow to the street. The lights are strong enough to allow us to see the street in detail.
I asked my long-suffering husband to be in shot and as a nod to the decisive moment and a touch of the Walker Evans , I got him to stand next to the ‘Caution – pedestrians in road’ sign. As luck would have it, the seemingly only other living person in the entire town shuffled past behind him.
Without any people around, it didn’t take me 30 minutes to take each shot like it did for Shintaro. The uninhabited photographs are very much about the ‘place’ rather than taking second stage to how they are used by us. It’s easier to imagine, despite the glare of modern light the, shop fronts and yellow lines, the people who would have trodden the cobbled streets to the church throughout Rye’s history.
This photograph has hints of Brassaï and Shintaro. The visible part of the street is suspended in the darkness. The pools of light just offer glimpses of what is there and highlights the textures of the walls. Because of the blankness of the dark the eye is drawn to the detail
Like the photograph above, the focus is on the light and the details it reveals. But if we look a little harder, just visible in the gloom is a figure.
Day Versus Night
Although this exercise was about observing different type of light, its impossible not to see the social implications of Covid-19 in these pictures. These were taken Saturday night and Sunday midday. The prominent Covid signs seem totally irrelevant in the empty streets. Rye is a tourist town. In a normal year these pavements would be thick with people trying to avoid cars as they step into the road to get round each other. The silence was what struck me most.
Its not about which photograph is better; day or night. Each one conveys a different message. In the daylight photograph the light is soft. There are no shadows and fewer sharp edges. Reflections in the windows are clearer and bright spots of colour stand out more. As with the night time shot, the lack of detail in the sky means your eye is drawn to the street. In the daytime it is the red of the sign that is the focus whereas in the night it is the glow of the lights.
References
Buchanan, K (2021) Lighting up the dark research Rut Blees Luxemburg, Brassaï and Sato Shintaro [Online] Available at:https://katie9.home.blog/research/lighting-up-the-dark-research-rut-blees-luxemburg-brassai-and-sato-shintaro/
Department of Photographs. “Walker Evans (1903–1975).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm (October 2004)
Landscape Stories (2016/20) Sato Shintaro – Night Lights [Online] Available at: http://magazine.landscapestories.net/en/archive/2015/night/projects/sato-shintaro. Accessed on: 02/01/21
Katies Photographic Journey 