In visual art, the story of ‘nocturnes’ starts with James McNeil Whistler. He was the first to borrow the term from music for titles like Nocturne in Blue and Silver (1872–8) – an atmospheric painting of Venice after dark. Although a number of eighteenth-century composers wrote ‘nocturnes’, Chopin’s slow piano pieces popularised the form in the nineteenth. A nocturne was a composition intended to evoke the unsettling beauty of the night and closely associated with a ‘serenade’ (which means ‘evening music’). But while a serenade is a love song with the certainty and commitment of a vocal declaration, nocturnes are always conflicted. They are elusive and ambivalent, at once happy and sad, passionate and restrained.
Nowadays, the medium in which one finds the
most nocturnes is photography. Artists as varied as Bas Jan Ader, Robert
Adams, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, Gregory
Crewdson, Wolfgang Tillmans and Olafur Eliasson have made evocative
night-time work. The photographs share more than a time of day however.
Closer examination reveals recurrent themes, clusters of sensibilities, even
a genre.
Nocturnes are not any old night shot, but pictures that take the night as a
primary subject matter and bear witness, however tangentially, to the
musical roots of the genre. On one hand, they have more sting than a sweet
serenade. They’re emotionally rich without being sentimental. They have the
charge of a flirtation or affair, but never promise the safety of marriage.
They take risks and court danger. On the other hand, nocturnes never talk
straight. They have a poetry that goes beyond the total visibility of
documentary or the dry exercises of photographic formalism. They’re never
practical or factual or disinterested. They allude, elude and captivate.
They’re about faith, not proof.
Two main axes map the genre – one is photographic, the other ‘painterly’. The photographic axis is aptly demostrated by a continuum that runs between Brassai’s dreamy images in ‘Paris de Nuit ‘ (1933) and Weegee’s stark photographs of Naked City (1945). Brassai hung out with surrealists and captured a landscape of lovers and nightworkers like an insomniac voyeur. Although some of his images appear to contemporary eyes as serenades, the best of them remain nocturnes. In Banc aux Tuileries (1932) a couple makes out on a park bench, their movements blurred. The light rakes in from the side and runs a finger down the tree and along the slats bench. The exposure is long, the moment languid. It’s utterly romantic, but saved by a surreal twist that avoids banality. The head and torso of the woman are disturbingly indecipherable. She has dissolved in the darkness or, maybe, she’s been consumed.
Weegee’s work sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Driven by tabloid values, many of his images of drunks sleeping on streets and crowds observing house fires are numbingly prosaic. They are cold, quick, flat news. Other works, however, make sense as nocturnes because they give you time, make you think and inspire your imagination. For example, it can be hard to take your eyes off Weegee’s images of the dead. In Gunman Killed by Off-duty Cop at 344 Broome St, February 3, 1942, the corpse is foreshortened and isolated, while the gun (which is so close to the edge of the picture plane that the viewer could almost grab it and run) suggests many contradictory narratives. The flattening flash of Weegee’s state-of-the-art Speed Graphic camera has flooded the picture with an even scorch of light. It’s an appropriately violent mode of representation.
Therein lies one axis of the nocturne tradition – not just between the poles of sex and death, romanticism and realism, but between a slow, sensual fantasy and the quick twists of fate that characterise a nightmare. You can see the lineage of these kinds of nocturnes in the inventive work of certain emergent artists. For example, Kelly Poe’s Untitled (Long Eared Owl) (2003) is a real life nightmare that evokes the incomprehension of death. Caught by both the ornithologist’s trap and the camera’s flash, the owl fears for its life. Poe uses techniques not unlike Weegee in order to capture her subject and, in so doing, is complicit in the bird’s fall from grace. The scientist and his trap are analogous to the photographer and her camera. The photograph is ‘live’, but the picture’s existential poetry pulls it beyond straight documentary. And it is disconcerting, but the complicated tangle of emotions that ensnare the viewer are not gratuitous. It’s a portrait of a glorious predator turned prey – an allegory of power relations. Fundamentally, and most importantly, this image is a meditation on the will to know. Above the owl, out in the wild, the night is deep, impenetrable, unseeable. The search for enlightenment would seem to be fatally flawed.
By contrast, Scott McFarland’s Segal Garden
at Night (2002) is an ironic contribution to the surreal side of the genre.
This picture is part of a series that explores the way nature is reworked
and deployed as a symbol of class and status. With the exception of Segal
Garden…, McFarland’s series consists entirely of daytime shots featuring
hard-working gardeners – pruning, inspecting, cutting back and controlling
the plant life. On one level, you could say that gardeners are to nature
what photographers are to the real. On another, you can see the relationship
of gardeners to nature as akin to that between superego and id. Like
parents, their combination of care and discipline aims at transforming the
natural outdoors into an enviable display of suburban respectability.
However, night offers liberation and escape. The plant turns into an animal.
Caught in the even glow of a bright spotlight, the beast guiltily stands out
against the demure shrubs and flowers around it. It’s the return of the
repressed. Expressionism supplants realism. Social imperatives are subverted
by psychological drives.
Shizuka Yokomizo’s Stranger No. 24 (2001) suggests both the existentialism
of Weegee and the eroticism of Brassai. In a delicious violation of social
norms, Yokomizo put letters through people’s doors, asking them to stand
alone in their window at an appointed time after dark so that she could take
their picture from outside. The resulting photographs document these
unpredictably intense encounters between strangers. Despite the Peeping Tom
associations, the pictures are not voyeuristic in the strict sense because
the subjects willingly offer themselves as objects of our gaze. In fact, a
key part of Yokomizo’s conceptual project is to relinquish control to those
depicted (it’s their room, lighting, clothes, posture and expression) and to
chance (she had little idea that the window grill would turn into a
phosphorescent green and orange veil). Moreover, what Yokomizo realised only
as she was putting away her tripod is that the stranger in No. 24 is
actually an artist standing in her studio. So this photo portrays one woman
artist locked in languorous eye contact with another, a kind of mutual
seduction through artistic practice, where one artist is happy to act the
muse as long as she can command the scene, while the other, ostensibly in
control behind the camera, submits excitedly to the vagaries of her
subject’s will. It’s a romantic tussle between an artist and her
doppelganger.
The second axis of the genre has less to do with the early specificities of photography than the legacy of painting, particularly as it relates to themes like the sublime and the picturesque. First with the arrival of colour, then with more sensitive film stocks and large scale printing, and finally with digital post-production software, photography has begun to command the scale and versatility of painting. It has become more adept at handling the grand themes, while its proximity to the ‘real’ can be deployed to add a surge of exhilaration or an extra bit of awe.
Florian Maier-Aichen’s Untitled (Mount Wilson) (2002) is a case in point. Like the classic sublime, it evokes infinity and, in being both nostalgic and futuristic, it plays with our sense of time. But unlike the sublime of old, it no longer depicts the dominance of nature. The alternation of night and day may be the most overt display of nature’s power, but the spectacular lights of the urban grid fight back and hold their own. The ominous mountain range in the foreground haunts but doesn’t oppress the city. More than anything, this image demonstrates that the twenty-first century sublime is about the dominance of representation over reality, for it is the picture’s very purity and perfection that lifts it out of the ordinary. Maier-Aichen has removed the Hollywood landmarks that might anchor the image in a specific place and enhanced the luminous marine layer with the delicate touch of his digital brush. He has combined two large-format, eight-minute exposures and stripped the colours down to a monochrome. By these means, not only has he made the most breathtaking picture of LA, but he’s created a space for interpretation and imagination.
Contrasting with the head-rush of the sublime, Seamus Nicolson’s Wayling (2001) has the poise and equilibrium of the picturesque. This photograph captures an in-between moment in an in-between place where the night has turned the busy cityscape into an empty stage. It marks an adolescent rite of passage – a girl alone out on the street at night. Wayling sits self-consciously, smokes defiantly, claiming this no man’s land for herself. Is she safe? Is it a portrait or is she a generic type? Does one’s alter ego come out at night? Away from the daytime world of work, fixed identities and responsibilities, are we free to be someone else? Wayling is illuminated by the most banal of urban icons – a neon petrol station sign. But what would normally be a blight on the landscape is here transformed into an altarpiece with a life of its own. It no doubt bears a message more significant than the price of unleaded.
Nocturnes cross over into a range of other genres. They can be landscapes or portraits, sublime or picturesque, captured ‘live’ or elaborately staged, comically fantastic or nightmarishly real. They can even be interiors. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s theatres, for instance, are wonderful nocturnes – they bear witness to past romance and identify the power of projection in all senses of the word. His night seascapes, by contrast, are not nocturnes at all – they’re too formal, objective and systematic. For another example of the distinction within a single artist’s oeuvre, Thomas Ruff’s big twinkly night skies made from appropriated negatives from observatory archives are quintessential sublime nocturnes, whereas his Nacht works, which look like stills from military surveillance videos, are not.
The difference between nocturnes and non-nocturnes is like the old debate between the nude and the naked. The boundaries are fluid and the definition is necessarily gestural because the rules are meant to be transgressed. Night-time photography is amongst the most technically difficult and nocturnes offer an opportunity to show just what the medium is capable of. One reason I’m convinced that nocturnes are a bonafide genre is because they have become an artistic proving ground – in much the same way as the nude was for nineteenth-century painters. Manet’s Olympia (1863) sought to outdo Courbet’s Reclining Nude (1858) which in turn critiqued Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814). Similarly, Thomas Demand’s Constellation (2000) can be seen as a subversive riff on Thomas Ruff’s Stars (1990), while Florian Maier-Aichen’s Untitled (Mount Wilson) enters into a dialogue and a game of oneupmanship with Gursky’s and Doug Aitken’s nocturnal images of LA. This may not be conscious for some artists or the slightest bit motivating for others, but it is part of the historical context of this period in fine-art photography.
What distinguishes nocturnes more than
anything else is the curious way in which they offer relief from the daytime
world of acceptable behaviour, official truths and mundane points of view.
For me, the antipathy of light and dark has never been about good and evil,
but fact and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity. With nocturnes, one can
escape into a shadowy world where the selective glow of man-made lights
picks out and interrogates what really matters. Nocturnes share secrets,
revel in the uncanny and allow the repressed to raise its intriguing head.
Whether they are therapeutic or threatening, serene or surreal, they always
harbour an infatuation with the unsettling beauty of the night.
Sarah Thornton is a writer and ethnographer