In this high tech world, you’re never without a camera, and can take a picture anywhere you go. But do these images convey the feelings of awe, excitement, wonder and fear you had while you were in those places? Adam Katseff discovered a way to do this by taking landscape photographs in the dark of night, revealing more by showing less.
If you look closely enough at this seemingly idyllic stretch of road, nestled between a lake and a steep hillside in Northern California, you’ll notice it’s not so idyllic — at least not for the newts and salamanders determined to cross to the other side.
The black belt test at Studio Naga is a 48-hour ordeal with no sleep. By the second night, students are running on pure adrenaline when they arrive to an unknown location blindfolded in the dark. Then, it’s time to fight.
The night is a perfect canvas for the ancient magic of Peruvian shamanism. In the darkness, your mind opens, allowing spirits to find a place to land
Comfort turns to horror when the night becomes weaponized – used to terrorize and control. This is the most ominous embodiment of the night. Its most salient symbols are those of burning crosses, and the nightriders delivering their messages of terror.
Getting into character and scaring people silly is one of Campbell Harmon’s favorite things in life. But his relationship to being a monster goes deeper than playing one in a haunted attraction.
Kristin’s daughter was just 16 years old when she began to struggle with drug addiction – methamphetamine, heroin, and more. It brought Kristin to her knees. Of all the painful challenges, the worst was not knowing where her daughter was in the middle of the night.
There is a cave in southern France that contains some of the world’s most deeply hidden secrets. To get there you must crawl on your belly through a long tomb-like passage, with your only light held between your teeth.
There are over 3500 species of crickets and each has a different song. One man fills his apartment in Brooklyn with their music, and then takes them out in public to perform alongside them. And then he eats them.
There’s really nothing else like late night call in shows on the radio – other humans, in real time, just chatting. It can bring comfort and normalcy to the hours that can feel like anything but comforting or normal.
For two months a year, in a small Norwegian city, the sun never goes above the horizon. One researcher visits to find out why its citizens are happy despite the lack of light.
What makes a place home? Is it a place that feels like a refuge? Is it somewhere you sleep really, really well? What if the place that feels like home is a secret apartment in the bowels of a giant mall?
This crazy thing happens in NYC as night approaches – as rush hour picks up and the streets get evermore hectic than normal, delivery men on bikes start racing through the streets to get people their restaurant food while it’s still hot. Many New Yorkers expect this service that is intrinsic to the city, yet they often view these men on bikes as a menace and a threat to public safety. Cesar works 60 hours a week delivering food, mostly for tips. He says they hate him until they need him.
Sometimes it takes losing your way in the dark, to realize that you were already lost.
Traveling at night as a passenger is an act of trust. As the sensations of movement lull you to the edge of sleep or beyond, you surrender to dislocation; disconnecting from place and time. The only constant is motion. As your consciousness bobs up into the present moment, in the darkness you could be anywhere, or nowhere at all.
There has never been a world without tragedy and heartache and injustice. But there has also never before been a time when human beings have had constant access to the breadth of human suffering. Our technology bathes us in this information, and it can be a challenge to not dissolve into a mass of emotion, or just go numb. Julia Scott found herself facing this dilemma, and intuitively creating a ritual for herself, the seeds of which were planted decades earlier.
Malcolm Saunders is a fisherman in Cornwall, on the southern tip of the UK. While most of the old fishing ports have transformed into tourist attractions, there are still some working fishing boats, manned by seasoned weathered fisherman. They’re holding onto to an almost forgotten way of life – one that ties their livelihood to nature, with all of the thrill and hardship that goes along with it. Their lives are governed by tides, and weather, and time – A fisherman goes out where and when the fish are, day or night. There’s nothing else to it.
Hospitals are amazing places. They’re emblems of the modern medical technology that saves and improves our lives in countless ways every day. But if you’ve ever roamed the halls of a hospital in the middle of the night, with its shiny echoey surfaces, background hum of anxiety, and distant monitors chiming like beacons of peril, you’re in no rush to return. But if you must, you’ll want someone like Shoshana Ungerleider there keeping an eye on things, especially if there are zebras.
One of the things that changes instantly when you have a baby is your relationship to sleep. It usually becomes scarce and precious, and everyone has advice. Much less talked about is the continuing nighttime struggle between parents and their young kids. Because by the time your child is a year or two old, any competent parent has it under control, right? Kids go to sleep and parents get to have their night. Adam Mansbach drew back the curtain on this ridiculous fallacy.
Our relationship to the darkness can shift over time. One of the main ways that this happens is by walking into the dark, both literally and metaphorically. By walking toward the thing that scares us the most, or causes the most pain, we have the potential to almost magically transform it into something completely different.