What is the purpose of usual photo?
To see not the photo itself, but the object that was taken, as if looking through a window. But when it is too bright or dark, we have information loses, "zero". In these gaps is possible to see an image surface and through it - the void, that we unconsciously try to fill with sense (like the silence in 4'33" by John Cage): from darkness, where we may find everything, to brightly lit space, where only seen is present.
Also "zero" is a mark of temperature, of Winter in Moscow, modern post-soviet city, that was meant for factory workers, not us. It is cold and lonely there. It is poetic. You leave and come home in the dark. The day light was seen only throw an office window. The city is a mystery.
It is more honest, when you can not see everything.
There are no illusions that everything is simple and clear.