Night Photography (Project Midnight Sun)

Ever since N98, I became very interested in lighting, realising that we are standing at the end of an era with old "legacy" lighting being slowly but surely replaced by LED's. I wanted to learn properly about the things I had unconsiously sensed for a long time, about the reason why I felt so special about the night scenes in Brno, about how different films reacted to different sources of light and other technical things.

What's more, I spent some time in Ireland after I shot N98, and every time I would fly back, I found myself in shock for a few nights, not being able to sleep properly in my room under the harsh white light from the new LED streetlights. I suddenly realised that the warmth I had associated with my childhood, the monochrome yellow of SOX lamps was gone forever and I honestly wanted them back. Flying back to the Czech Republic, I still saw vast areas of old yellow HPS lighting and realised that they would be met with a similar fate as the lighting in Ireland. I almost felt a necessity to document these scenes, wishing I had done the same back in Ireland in the past. I really wanted to capture night as we all remember it, its magical qualities that I saw were being stripped away at the cost of brute efficient technological progress.

All of this has honestly had a very strong impact on my whole life, almost feeling at times that there is nothing stopping people from ripping away all the character I valued in the world in return for some perceived form of progress, masked by pure data driven efficiency. This is not to say that I am against this progress in principle, I truly understand it, all the negative effects associated with old lighting, however I do wish that the discussion about character and aestethic was present and communicated while making decisions that affect us all. From the lights we sleep under to the buildings we live in and products we use. I have come to openly criticise and reject a philosophy which puts efficiency at the centre of every decision, degrading everything and everyone into "pure" numbers, one which assumes we are living in almost laboratory conditions. This has had an impact and can be seen throughout my all forms of my work.