PAST PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS
Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled from the series 'Twilight', 2001, © Gregory Crewdson (click image for larger version)
10 October - 17 December 2006
This exhibition focuses on eight contemporary artists whose photography and installations are made at, or suggest, the fleeting state of the world at dusk. It explores a time of day and a quality of light that presents technical challenges but also embodies a haunting mood and the possibility of narrative intrigue or psychological tension.
At twilight, the colour and quality of light go through rapid and dramatic changes. For photographers, who are highly attuned to the subtleties of light, this is a particularly significant and poignant time. The artists in the exhibition have all made work that focuses on the end of the day and investigates twilight, as distinct from night.
Their grouping shows a variety of approaches to the theme. Each artist is guided by the quality of twilight in the place where they work and by the wider social issues, cultural resonances and poetic possibilities of the magic hour.
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Robert Adams
Robert Adams is best known for his series of photographs that investigates urban encroachment into the landscape of the American West. In much of his work, Adams balances a sense of hope for Nature's persistence against despair with man's destruction of what was, until relatively recently, wilderness.
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Gregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson reworks the American suburb into a stage-set for the inexplicable, often disturbing, events that take place at twilight. In creating what he calls 'frozen moments', he has developed a process akin to the making of a feature film. Operating on an epic scale, he uses a large crew to shoot and then develop the images during post-production.
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Philip-Lorca diCorcia made the Hollywood series (also known as The Hustlers) in an area of Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood, frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts.
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Ori Gersht
Gersht uses the sky as a canvas for his experiments with the physical properties of photography. Through colour saturation, these almost abstract images assert both the primacy of natural light (the raw material of photography) and the ability of colour photography to interpret it.
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Bill Henson
Bill Henson has returned consistently to the orchestration of available light, and in particular of twilight, using it to create a kind of modern mythology.
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Chrystel Lebas
Chrystel Lebas shot the Abyss series in forests where twilight, rather than creating a theatrical abundance of light and colour, heralds their loss. Using a panoramic camera and long exposures, Lebas observes the effects of the fading light, creating images that contain an imprint of the event as it unfolds over time.
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Boris Mikhailov
Mikhailov proposes a monochrome visual language to deal with this new social reality. The photographs are tinted blue, both to make them appear 'old' and to refer to the 'blue hour' of twilight.
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Liang Yue
Yue made the Morse Code series in Beijing during China's recent, and ongoing, economic boom. Part of a larger body of work called Several Dusks, the photographs were taken during the sand storms that blow in from the desert. Along with the atmospheric pollution of the city, the sand creates a grey-yellow monochrome that evens out perception and plays with the awareness of time.
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Book Tickets
Information on ticket prices and how to book.
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Photography Competition
This competition has now closed. Visitors who contributed were asked to take inspiration from the exhibition and capture the mysterious essence of twilight. They were then able to upload their own twilight inspired images to the website here. See the winning entry and view over 900 photographs uploaded by those who took part in the competition here.
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Twilight Events
Information on events coinciding with Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour, including a one-day symposium, a photography demonstration and Friday Late.