After Dark

Nights at the boardwalk were a summertime tradition for teenagers in my hometown. We’d throw darts at balloons, eat huge slices of pizza, and brag about the bars we’d visit once we were old enough. Secretly, I dreaded when that day would come. I found the bars seedy and quite frightening. Yet as I grew older, I began to think that perhaps life could not be lived to the fullest if one went to bed every night at 10pm. So I fought yawns for hours past my bedtime, then suffered through the interminable after-parties that followed. I thought it was a rite of passage, or that it would make me more interesting. But most of the time, I was just counting the minutes until it would be socially acceptable for me to leave. It was embarrassing not to be able to have fun like I was supposed to. I desperately wanted to belong… but, I wanted just as desperately to be home in bed, comfortable, with my mis-adventures behind me. I watched life after dark with a bit of an anthropologist’s detachment - I remember seeing the scene as a person from a different culture might. But actually I was watching my own peers, my own culture. While other people were wrapped up in socializing, I noticed how differently teenagers acted and dressed when they gathered at night on the boardwalk, out of the watchful eyes of adults - the posturing, the roughhousing, the extroversion so extreme it almost seemed forced. (They look like they are having fun, behaving as young people ought - should I be behaving that way, too?) I looked at the frank uninhibitedness of drunken behavior, dancing bodies looking disjointed under the pulsating strobe, the exaggerated conversational gestures made necessary by music far too loud for normal conversation. I wondered what made the others so different from me. I wondered if I should (or could) join the rest of the world. I never did decide. The motion blur, at first just a technique to obtain a bright enough exposure, made everything in my photos look distorted and surreal. Laughing mouths opened unnaturally wide. Walkers moved in dreamlike trails. Faces appeared as if born suddenly out of the night, luminous, glowing, unearthly, then fading away before they could be clearly perceived. Everything looked impressionistic and bizarre. For the first time, my pictures took in the night and gave it back to me exactly as I had always perceived it… grotesque, unwholesome, yet somehow effervescent and romantic. As a photographer, I’ve finally found a way to join life after dark. With my camera, I can happily amuse myself for hours. I don’t have to fight against myself to be more outgoing; I don’t have to (try to) act like one of the cool kids. I just wander about, alone, lost in thought, transforming my experience of the summer nights into dreamlike pictures.