All-Nighters is an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.

As a photographer, I work the night shift — when daylight gives way to moonlight, neon, and street light. In cities, especially New York, the darkness awakens me in a way the light of day never can. Gradually, my insomniac wanderings have taken me to the more ambiguous, transitional zones of the city. And I am seeing these not in black and white, as I used to, but in color — as if the visual noise of daytime were transforming itself into haunting nocturnal tonalities.



High Line

The workday crowds have ebbed; houses, streets, bridges and parks resemble a giant set, a theatrical approximation of a town or city. Perhaps one or two ambiguous figures remain, apparently as lost as I am. It is in such moments that I can begin to populate these spaces with my own thoughts and fantasies.

Kentile with Fence

I’m a roamer of limbo regions, one of our last frontiers — places that seem unloved and overlooked, cracks in the urban facade. The long exposures — sometimes for up to a minute — required by the low light are my way of giving such places attention and respect.

Number 39

While I wait for the light and shapes to register on my film, a passerby might accidentally walk into the picture. At one time, interlopers annoyed me. Recently, however, I have begun to appreciate such visits, welcoming these fellow night-wanderers into my photographs. Are they surrogates for me, actors hurrying across a set, or lost friends and relatives coming to people my nocturnal cityscapes? Whoever they are, these figures add to the feeling that something has just happened, that something is about to happen.

Bethesda Fountain

When I discover a site that attracts me, I return to it night after night. The first few times, the atmospheric conditions or the artificial lighting may not be quite right. But on a subsequent visit, I may find that a light has gone out, creating the odd shadow that makes the space more angular. I’m delighted by such discrepancies, which are nearly invisible during the daytime: the unexpected and asymmetric, the quietly out of kilter.

Pepsi

Exploring the border between Brooklyn and Queens one night, I discovered a strange transitional zone behind the large neon Pepsi Cola sign on the East River. For years, I had seen that sign from the Manhattan side as a kind of commercial icon. Now, I was suddenly on a construction site, with bulldozers and backhoes parked for the night. The earth was beautifully plowed, dark brown and scored with tracks, as if on a farm. I was startled into a vision of the city’s rural past, ensconced and hidden behind the great red sign.

Fulton Landing Warehouse

Walking past a deserted roofless warehouse in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, I saw motion-sensitive security lights projecting slanting blocks of green and yellow light onto the vacant ground enclosed by the structure. This warehouse and the distant glowing Manhattan Bridge are part of today’s New York, but they are also a link to the vanished 19th-century commercial city. Even so, such a place is not merely about the contrast between past and present. The city has a way of devouring its past and creating not memorials to a specific time so much as monuments to erasure itself, signs of pure absence and vacancy.

All photographs by Lynn Saville; text by Lynn Saville and Philip Fried. View the entire All-Nighters series.

Lynn Saville is a photographer whose work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally. “Night/Shift,” a book of her color night photographs, with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto, was published in 2009. Photographs from that series were exhibited at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York in 2009. More work can be seen on her Web site.