Process

I began this work after taking a photo with my iPhone 11 at the Eno River one night. I wanted to test the camera under a severe lowlight condition. I was surprised by the photo’s grainy texture, almost as if it were film, and what I think of as color leakages—where unexplained blotches of RBG colors emerge.

Artist Talk Notes | February 24th, 2022

Apple came out with “night mode” for iPhones in 2019, which uses new software and hardware capabilities to take brighter photos in lowlight conditions. 

The iPhone 11 was the first phone to feature night mode, and with its wide angle lens and accompanying larger sensor, the camera could “take in” more light.

When lowlight conditions are detected, machine learning algorithms analyze the light available and determine the number of images that should be taken over a period of time and aggregated into a single photo. 

This method is similar to high dynamic range methods developed to photograph a scene with multiple lighting conditions, such as a landscape, by aggregating several images with various exposures. Gustave Le Gray developed this method as early as the 1850s to composite a seascape, that without this method, could not render the sky and the sea in the same image because the range of luminosity was too wide for one exposure. 

I find these techniques a way of forcing two worlds into the same world, and I’m interested in exploring the aesthetics of not tying the separate light worlds together. In some images in Night Mode, for instance, there is a light and dark threshold that renders the pixels clear if surpassed.

Not only do night mode images composite different light worlds, they also composite different times into one image, once again calling into question the representation of time and space in the photographic image, which has never been of a single moment. I’m recalling Louis Daguerre’s 18th century long exposure of a busy Paris street, one of the first photographs, that rendered only a single still man getting his shoe shined. However, computational photography today leans toward compositing an abundance of certain information over time into the photograph as present, instead of rendering this information as absent, such as the crowded sidewalks and streets in Daguerre’s photograph.

In this effort to force information, Apple’s night mode sometimes leaks color blotches into the image, spots that appear too red, blue, or green. This is an effect I’ve exaggerated here.

On a personal note, I grew up outside Chicago, not far from the hundreds of miles of soy and cornfields that make up the midwestern landscape. If Le Gray’s project was to composite sky and sea, we in the midwest must composite sky and GMO corn. Living in North Carolina, where the trees often block a clear view of the horizon, has made me wonder at how trees are analogous to cuts in sight and enlightenment ways of knowing. Considering that Western art history’s linear perspective developed in deforested environments, I wonder how to recuperate forested landscapes as a way of seeing and knowing, as perhaps, a confidently uncertain form of machine vision.