A Month of Nights, Derby, traces the activity of the city of Derby and its inhabitants at night. The photographs were captured using homemade pinhole cameras, attached to makeshift time-lapse mechanisms. Triggered to open their shutters for one hour during the hours of darkness each night for the duration of one winter month, the rudimentary mechansims were distributed throughout the city centre. Motion and bustle has been translated into softly agitating lines, double exposures and shadowy hollows.
The ability to photograph on the streets of Britain is becoming more and more problematic as police regulations continually tighten. The UK hosts one of the highest CCTV cameras per capita in the world and 'A Month of Nights, Derby' took its inspiration from this notion of Britain's culture of surveillance. Concealed inside wooden nextboxes, the camera mechanisms were able to silently observe, free from tampering or suspicion. A number of the nestboxes were sited in close proximity to Bold Lane multi-storey car park, a typical surveillance hotspot and interestingly one of the world's most secure places. The car park hit the 'safest top 10' in 2006 with a system of specially-designed motion sensors located underneath each car parking space, a far cry from its infamy in the 1990's as a criminal haven. Framed by the circular aperture of the nestbox, the blurry, ghost-like photographs are not about the moment, but instead coagulate the frenetic nature of modern life into a more pedestrian pace. It is true that some of the images are virtually blurred beyond recognition, yet they are not out of focus, but focussed on something other than clarity of image; in other words, the evocation of place.
Selected by Emma Morris, Photoworks
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