Masters of the night

Shooting at night is one of the most popular forms of street photography and although it requires a different mind-set and the technical challenges are greater, for many people the allure of the city lights, neon signs and dramatic atmosphere is worth the extra effort to get that shot in the dark.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that night photography began to become popular. The slow film speeds and the limited sensitivity of photographic processes before then meant that long exposures were required to record in low-light conditions. This meant that photographing the streets required the use of a bulky tripod to support the heavy cameras of the time. However, this did not deter the master photographers of the time and out into the night they would go, encumbered by their gear, to capture the life and atmosphere of the streets.

It’s surprising to learn just how early in the development of photography that night time shooting became a regular activity. For example, Alfred Stieglitz began to photograph at night on the streets of New York at the very end of the 19th century and he was one of the early pioneers in capturing the human presence on the streets. Of course, the amount of artificial light illuminating the urban environment was nothing like what we have in our towns and cities today and so the light of the moon was one of the main sources.

Moving into the twentieth century, the Hungarian photographer André Kertesz began shooting at night around 1914 in Budapest, later moving to Paris where he was joined by another Hungarian Gyula Halász, aka Brassai, whose pictures are among some of the most famous and celebrated night photographs in history. Brassai counted the likes of Picasso, Dali, Giacometti and Matisse as some of his friends and he soon became a celebrated force in producing the most striking and atmospheric images of Parisian nightlife during the 1930s. These pictures focused on the bars, brothels and theatres that were filled with the subjects and characters that Brassai used as his focal points.

In 1932, he published Paris by Night, one of the first such books ever produced and it remains a powerful document of the life and times of the French capital. It’s worth pointing out that many of Brassai’s striking images were actual set-ups. He would choose his characters from friends and acquaintances and position them exactly how he wanted them to appear. Whilst this may go against some people’s idea of true nature of street photography, it in no way diminishes them as genuine representations of Paris at that time. The people he photographed and the places in which he captured them were very real and the pictures he made are faithful documents of the era.

German born photographer, Bill Brandt’s A Night in London published in 1938, was clearly inspired by Brassai’s book but is a very different and no less inspiring collection of images taken in England’s capital city just before the outbreak of the second World War. Again, the photographer called upon the assistance of his friends and family to appear in the pictures of urban scenes. However, the photographs were factual and the use of ‘models’ helped to illustrate the everyday lives of Londoners at the time and included people such as policemen, tailors, nurses, school children and even a parlourmaid who he photographed on several occasions going about her work. There is a voyeurism attached to these images but the viewer is asked to accept them for what they are and they in no way ask for judgement to be cast on them. They are simply a record of life at the time.

Another photographer who settled in England in the 1930s, was John Gay. Born Hans Gohler, in Karlsruhe in Germany, he was a highly skilled photographer who could turn his hand to anything with superb results. However, it’s his urban photographs which show the city in really creative ways which are the ones that stand out. His work from the late 1950s and 60s includes some beautiful night shots of England’s towns and cities, featuring images of train stations, residential streets and London’s bridges.

American photographers Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas certainly proved themselves during the hours after dark and the richly saturated colours of their pictures are a direct contrast to the black and white images of their forebears. Technological advancements in both in cameras and film stock mid-way through the century, now allowed photographers to venture out at night more equipped to capture images of life on the streets. Film speeds became faster and cameras by this time were all handheld and more suitable for working long hours on the streets. Both Leiter and Haas produced stunning images of the streets of New York, pushing the boundaries of street photography at the time and showing that the new colour films were ideal for this kind of work.

Heading into the 1970s and 80s, the night street photography scene went from strength to strength. Bruce Davidson’s series of pictures captured on the New York subway system and Daido Moriyama’s high-contrast and gritty depictions of life on the streets of Tokyo, are just two of the notable works that stand out from this era.

Moriyama’s pictures are a unique and very personal view of the Japanese capital city. Although his images often seem confrontational, there is also a melancholy to them. Through his daily journeys through the streets and back alleys, like a streetwise dog on the prowl, he brings us images that demand we look at the world according to his eyes. Using a compact camera, Moriyama’s pictures become even denser and more fragmented at night, and lead us truly into the realm of the senses.

As Moriyama continues to shoot the streets, even into his eighties, his grainy black and white style eschews the technical excellence of today’s photographic world and is the perfect foil to the digital perfection of the twenty-first century. Today’s street photographers are perfectly equipped for shooting night pictures on the streets and in the urban environment. Massive leaps forward technologically, now mean that low-light photography is far less of a challenge and today’s cameras and lenses, even on the darkest of nights, can still yield good results.

Photographers such as Alex Webb and Harry Gruyaert have made night photography a firm part of their output and shooting after dark has become as routine as shooting on the brightest day. Their nocturnal explorations have not only brought new dimensions to their own work but they, like those before them, have inspired thousands of other street photographers to follow on the exciting path of shooting after dark.

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