Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour

by Martin Barnes, Kate Best

Twilight’s otherworldly and alchemical qualities have long attracted artists, but for photographers, who are particularly attuned to the subtleties of light, it is an especially significant time. This book draws together the work of contemporary photographers who have explored the visual and psychological effects of the transition from day to night. It examines their technically ambitious attempts to record or replicate the rapid and transient effects of daylight succumbing to darkness, and analyses the mysterious states of mind and awakened sensibilities these works suggest, at the threshold between the familiar and the unknown. In placing the photographs in their broader historical, literary, meteorological and technical contexts, Twilight reveals the timeless allure of the magic hour.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 2006

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This catalogue accompanied an intriguing 2006 exhibition in the London Victoria & Albert Museum. It focused on work by eight contemporary photographers - Robert Adams, Gregory Crewdson, Bill Henson, Boris Mikhailov, Chrystel Labas, Ori Gersht, Liang Yue, Philip-Lorca diCorcia - inspired by the daily recurring phenomenon of twilight. The subdued poetry of this interval had been enthusiastically cultivated by early practitioners of photography. This taste for mysterious light effects culminated in the Pictorialist aesthetic (with Steichen, Kuhn and Stieglitz as prominent representatives). After the First World War the mood shifted and photographers embraced modernist experiment in rigor and abstraction. Twilight imagery was out of step with the times and would remain so for a very long while. Only in the last few decades there has been a cautious return to the spell of the magic hour. Judging from the portfolios included in the exhibition one is led to conclude that the fin de siècle appropriation of twilight’s morbid Stimmung has been most successful. Whilst the contemporary language has been deepened with surrealist and minimalist strands, the overall mood almost inevitably harks back to that period infatuated with dreams and the liminal state between life and death.

In addition to the photographers’ portfolios the book includes a number of short essays. I particularly liked Martin Barnes' survey of twilight-inspired photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

By the way, a nice piece of music to listen to when browsing this book is Charles Koechlin’s Les Heures Persanes (in the version for orchestra which, compared to the piano original, features an even more subdued color palette).

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some sets are definitely stronger than others, but the sky gradients series captured out the rear window of a car makes this book worth looking at on its own.