In the depths of the New England winter, working through my own creative funk and existential questions, I decided to embark on something different than my usual nature/landscape and travel work. Since an early age, I’ve always enjoyed the evening walk - watching dusk set and the world settle in. I remember leaving home and going jogging after sunset in the California suburbs where I grew up; and later, exploring extensively on foot at night during stints of varying lengths lived in Baltimore, Guadajalara, and Manhattan. This is my attempt to, for the first time, earnestly photograph this precious period of the day, and to create a printed collection of evening walks remembered. In this series, starting with our local neighborhoods in Boston, and expanding outward to evening walks elsewhere in the world, I want to document the fleeting blue hour after sunset, when night has just fallen, and the warm glow of a lighted window is calling us home. With this series, I am trying to portray the dual feelings of alienation and belonging that I have felt throughout my rambling lifetime, wandering strange towns and searching for a place - physically and metaphysically - to call home. Who is the viewer standing outside in the growing dark? What drew them to this well-lit place? Why do they hesitate to approach? Will they come in from the cold?
Unavoidably, there is a distinct note of voyeurism that nighttime photography evokes - peering down streets and alleys and witnessing myriad lives playing out on the other side of the window, scenes and shadows moving behind curtains open or drawn. For this project, I am avoiding pointing my camera into homes, both to respect privacy, and because the purpose of the collection is not to depict people or interiors, but rather to evoke presence - a sense of invitation, of beckoning, of light drawing us closer amidst gloom. I have chosen to photograph around dusk (rather than in deep night) because I want the fading daylight to provide occasional sky interest and shadow details, and also because dusk is when I most enjoy these walks, and when the world feels most poignant. As people arrive home after work, loved ones embrace in the entryway, and streetlamps and candle-lights are just beginning to flicker on. Out on these strolls, I am reminded of my work as a palliative care physician - a clinician who meets the seriously ill, making deep, powerful, and (often) ultimately fleeting connections with human beings navigating the river of life. As I work, I form an image of them and who they are, and eventually they leave the hospital or the clinic and return home. However you define home, and whether or not I ever see them again, we are always passing each other by - gently, comfortingly, fellow wanderers in the night.
A grieving widow once told me she could never again look at her dining room or light its beautiful chandelier without thinking of her beloved, let alone actually set or sit down at the table. Her grief is an expression of her love, and hence, her love is represented by the light (and the absence of light) that shines through her window. My heart ached when she told me this offhandedly during a bereavement call; she could not have known about my love of photography, nor why her story should affect me so. She is on my mind during many of these outings, even as the technical craft of night photography (the careful metering of exposures and steady fiddling with settings and dials and tripod) helps my mind move away from the suffering I encounter in my day job. This work-in-progress is for that widow and others like her, like all of us. May we come in from the cold, and sit beside the warmth and the suffering. May we always find a lighted window somewhere, calling us home.