I spent five nights in darkness after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, on the edge of the blackout grid in New York City. Walking under the glow of a generator-powered Empire State Building, I remembered the rich legacy of photographers’ renderings that depicted various states of urban darkness, including Bill Brandt’s iconic images of wartime Britain during the second World War and Alfred Steiglitz’s early renderings of city scenes, created when manmade light was still a novelty.
During the blackout, I marveled at the newfound geometry of the darkened buildings powerfully silhouetted against the night sky. The city, for that brief time, was redefined visually. I studied the era of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and the story of the introduction of electricity into urban life.
I wondered how it felt when carbon arc streetlights came on in 1882 for the first time. I saw man-made light as a symbol for progress and transformation, how it relates to photography’s history and also how both technologies were introduced to a mass audience at the same time. I also realized, while standing there in the forced darkness, how delicate our whole electrical grid still is.
Since then, I’ve worked with traditional medium-format black-and-white film and a 25-year-old camera, searching for, as Henri Cartier-Bresson famously referred, the places where "the pulse beats more." The final images are constructed over time, the result of multiple layers of exposure manifested over a period of hours, and sometimes even days. The prints are constructed as well, made by hand in a darkroom slowly, using the light of an enlarger on silver gelatin paper.
I’ve explored the areas where Edison launched electrical power to fifty-nine customers in the Financial District of Manhattan as well as other neighborhoods where artificial light was first introduced, including the Flatiron District and the area around J.P. Morgan’s historic home in midtown Manhattan. I like to think that the wonder of seeing created light for the first time still dwells in these places.