Night photography & Me.

Images copyright Mark Page

The above pictures I made between 2000 and around 2005. I used to love photographing at night. I shot them using film and old medium format camera's. Bloody great exposure times, just me and my camera out at 4, 5AM, often in lonely backstreets, the Adrenalin pumping like fuck at every sound, aware of every ranting drunk, every blagging smack head.I hope there's some fear, some tension in these pictures, I hope so because often I almost shat.............

I loved photographing at night because of the above reasons and because I loved the work of Brassai and Rut Blees Luxemburg, they were my nocturnal heroes.

I photographed at night because of the subject matter. These old abandoned structures I thought suited the night, this is when they oozed atmosphere, history. And then there were the colours that were produced from the long exposure and the artificial light, oh some of of those plum Sky's!

There was no cold calculated concept behind my nocturnal adventures. It was as simple as, the aesthetic suiting the subject, It helped to conjure an atmosphere that I wanted to capture.

There's been of late a lot of snobery from certain quarters about night photography, I'll admit that sometimes it can be used as a "crutch" It's often easy to get wow factor with little substance behind the pretty image, but hey that can be levelled at toy camera photography, pinhole photography or old, antiquated techniques photography, but those for some reason seldom receive the same amount of criticism.

I may no longer make night time photography myself, I moved on as in the end I was getting lazy and for me it became a gimmick I had come to rely on, but I still love to lose myself in good night shots made by others, and I'm sure I always will.