Night photography was initially a report on the technical benefits of lighting. Then it became a document about the secret life of cities and their less exemplary inhabitants. Finally, it became an aesthetic of the phantasmagorical, the sleepy other side of daytime hyperactivity.

The city by night synthesizes several drives of the metropolitan gaze, some of its most conspicuous chimeras. On the one hand, the idea of the uninhabited city or the city inhabited by those who have all the time in the world. Or the feeling that cities in the dark, half-seen, somehow strangely belong to those who observe them, as though, distanced from the bustle of the morning, these streets and these buildings are more ours, we have discovered them and even built them by looking at them. Finally, the city at night displays a non-transferable empathy: coming across someone sitting on a bench or walking at odd hours creates a feeling of secret collectivity.

But the city by night also retains its functional qualities. It is not the complete blackness of the blackout, power failure or disaster. It is the tenuous parsimony of cities whose repose seems to us, for some anomalous reason, more sincere, less aggressive.