Wait Until Dark

AN INSPIRING NEW BOOK REMINDS US THAT THE NIGHT TIME IS THE RIGHT TIME FOR OUTDOOR PHOTOGRAPHY

- Barry Tanenbaum

LET’S FACE IT: WE’VE ALL SEEN, taken, edited, judged, read, or written about so many photographs over so many years, sometimes we get…well, jaded. Then, if we’re lucky, along comes something that delivers a jolting reminder of the surprise and delight photography is capable of delivering.

Night Vision: Magical Photographs of Life After Dark is that something. Just published by National Geographic Books, the volume’s 200-plus photographs are inspiring and imaginative examples of what’s possible when gifted, determined photographers join the night shift.

Landscape photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel wrote the foreword. “We’d done a number of assignments for National Geographic magazine that had a significant number of night pictures in them,” Cook explains, “including a whole project on night gardens—which came from a personal project we’d been working on. We kind of got to be known as the night specialists.”

The foreword quickly establishes their affinity for the magic of the dark. “We talk about magic a lot in our introduction,” Jenshel says. “Our work is always trying to be mysterious, magical, and metaphorical, and with night time you get two of those almost automatically; the magical and the mysterious are so apparent and so tactile. We talk about the challenge in the sense of photographing what you don’t see—in moonlight you don’t see colors, only blacks, silvers, grays, and whites.”