Dietrich / TwilightPhotography

Twilight Photography – a Brief History

(15.7.2023) In early photography the world shown often seemed to be a world of twilight, a world in twilight, and it would be an interesting question if early photographers, the pioneers of photography, only saw this as something to be avoided and as something that would disappear (as technology was progressing). Or also as something that reduced representations of the visual world to the necessary minimum, and thus made the representation of the world (as a world in twilight) a tool of better recognition of the world, due to a reduction to the minimum of visual elements, and due to an avoiding of unnessessary detail.
Today twilight photography is very popular, and there is no lack of tutorials as to how to make pictures of the golden or the blue hour, or in the golden or blue hour. Photographers want to do that, cameras are offering presets for twilight sceneries, and a recent trend in press photography has highlighted industrial sites (such as the end of gaz pipelines) in blue hour scenarios. Often, as one may assume, without actual wanting to reduce representations of such sites to the necessary minimum of detail, but perhaps unconsciously doing so, and knowing that such sites can be interpreted as important clusters of technology, ideology, political economy, illusions, political mistakes and so on. What we are doing here is only a first attempt to interpret the history of photography as incorporating twilight photography (and of course: photography in the blue hour), but perhaps also an attempt, a first attempt, to interpret the history of photography as twilight photography or as something to be interpreted form the angle of twilight photography.

1) Two Icons of Twilight Photography

One does know that photographer Camille Silvy did make a series of Studies on Light. The photograph shown on the left is usually identified as the one from the series that showed twilight and was entitled Twilight. It was made in the year 1859.
One might say that this kind of early photography rather implied color than using it, but early photography was not colorless at all, and by means of printing tecniques a blue hour atmosphere could be created if one was wanted. Photographer Edward Steichen, several decades later, made apparently three prints of his now iconic The Flatiron (picture above and on the right; date is 1904), and apparently he did use the color blue for one of these prints.
In the Silvy twilight we see detail, and some of these details lack explanation. What object, one might ask for example, is handed over from one of the figures to the other. While in the Steichen twilight there is no detail lacking explanation. Steichen twilight, one might say stages the interplay of wet winter streets, the wedge-shape of the new architecture, the branches, and the traffic of people, organized by carriages, and: not to forget: light, artificial light, and natural light. But there is no implication of a story, only a setting. While in Silvy, we might be inclined to ask: ›who is that?›, ›whom are we seeing, and what are these people doing?‹. While on the other hand the picture is charming, due to color being monochrome, and due to monochromatism rather implying all other colors than blcking the use of color per se. With cyanotype, by the way, a tecnique was available (in development since the 1840s), which allowed to create images with a blue basic tone. Which means that a blue hour atmosphere, on some level, created itself, without actual twilight photography (in the modern sense) being necessary. It could be staged – at noon, if necessary – and be implied by the final product.

2) Zone

The iconic poem Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the poets from the Picasso orbit, can be read as an evocation of the journey of a flaneur walking the streets of Paris. By day, by night, by dusk, by dawn. The poem is confronting the reader with a sequence of images – some being memories, evoking distant cities, some evoking a distant past, some evoking the morning of this particular day, already passed – but we are also confronted with the Paris of the actual day and the actual night. And the poem ends, as one might say, at dawn, with the sun coming up. But before dawn, we have seen (or better: heard) the milkmen: Tu es seul le matin va venir / Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues.
On some level this poem was doing twilight photography (and sound recording), turned into language. And if the photographer Brassaï, another figure from the Picasso orbit, did photograph the Eiffel tower at the hour of twilight (no picture available here), this picture might be interpreted as being a kind of entrance to what Brassaï is actually known for today, namely: night photography. Brassaï did specialize in night photography, but his oeuvre is large (and probably largely unexplored), and perhaps one would find a cosmos as complex as the cosmos of Zone. Which means, and this is what we would like to say, that twilight photography has an existence also in the context of literature and vice versa. We might spot more details, more stories in Brassaï, after reading Zone again. And in reading Zone, we may encounter a literary equivalent of twilight and night photography. Only working with the necessary elements, with details as well, but not with unnecessary detail. And the work of Brassaï, although it might seem a bit conventional at times, at least for a 21st century beholder, might also be seen as anticipating more complex contemporary photography, a photography which often, with much effort, is staged. Staged with references to literature, film, or other photographers. And the world of twilight photography, unexplored as it seems to be as a cosmos in itself, is a cosmos of complex cross-references. In photography, but also in the arts as such, and inbetween the various arts.

3) Twilight Photography Today

My own contribution to twilight photography is simple, and it is showing (above; on the left) only the necessary elements: my balkony, the evening star, a lantern, and two so-called june beetles, active in twilight hours of June, and while being active – seeming to be heavily drunk. It is not a particularly good photograph, tecnically speaking, but it cannot be repeated, since I am not able to call up the two beetles again. This is photography (the drunkness can only be implied, but I do know it, since I have seen the beetles fly). Language could do it better.
Some tutorials of twilight photography focus on animals, nocturnal animals, bats, beetles, that only can be observed at dusk or at night. And we may enter an atmosphere, populated by animals, an atmospehre which tends to be uncanny, but perhaps not yet creepy. The creepiness of twilight is rather explored by photographers like Gregory Crewdson, who did make a Twilight series which is full of references. To other photographers like Jeff Wall, but also to filmmakers like David Lynch or Alfred Hitchcock, and indirecly probably also to the history of painting etc. If we look back at early photography, there is actually not much that early photography could not have done. But the sensibility is a different one. It is one of looking back rather, than of exploring the future of photography, rather one turning photography into a more film-oriented way of painting with light. A painting resonating, with echoes of film and other media (and this early photography could not have done). And hence we see that twilight photography, by no means, does stand alone or by itself. It can be focussed on exclusively. But a brief look into its history does show that focussing on twilight photography does mean to focus on art as such. And, if one does like so, on the philosophy of twilight, and the philosophy of the blue hour, which would be the cosmos of ideas about twilight and about the world in twilight (and probably born by twilight, and during a blue hour).

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Titian, Leonardo and the Blue Hour

The Blue Hour Continued (into the 19th century)

The Blue Hour at Istanbul (Transcription of Cecom by Baba Zula)

The Blue Hour in Werner Herzog (Today Painting V)

The Blue Hour in Louis Malle

Kafka in the Blue Hour

Blue Matisse

Blue Hours of Hamburg and LA

The Blue Hour in Chinese Painting

Dusk and Dawn at La Californie

The Blue Hour in Goethe and Stendhal

The Blue Hour in Raphael

Who Did Invent the Blue Hour?

The Blue Hour in Paul Klee

The Blue Hour in Guillaume Apollinaire

The Blue Hour in Charles Baudelaire

The Blue Hour in Marcel Proust

The Contemporary Blue Hour

The Blue Hour in 1492

The Blue Hour in Hopper and Rothko

The Blue Hour in Ecotopia

Historians of Light

The Hour Blue in Joan Mitchell

Explaining the Twilight

The Twilight of Thaw

The Blue Hour in Pierre Bonnard

Explaining the Twilight 2

The Blue Hour in Leonardo da Vinci and Poussin

The Blue Hour in Rimbaud

Faking the Dawn

Historians of Picasso Blue

The Blue Hour in Caravaggio

Watching Traffic

The Blue Hour in Camus

The Blue Hour in Symbolism and Surrealism

Caspar David Friedrich in His Element

Exhibiting the Northern Light

Caspar David Friedrich in His Element 2

Robert Schumann and the History of the Nocturne

The Blue Hour in Robert Schumann

The Twilight of Thaw 2

Multicultural Twilight

The Blue Hour in Anton Chekhov

The Blue Hour in Medieval Art

MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM A History of the Blue Hour Painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi

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