Rain owns this picture; the colored lights merely rent it. Strung along the eaves of the low building, green, gold, red and blue, they ought to mean festivity, but the wet windshield melts each bulb into a long streak of color, candy pulled soft by water. The weather, not the electrician, decides what shines here, what smears, what survives. Above, the sky is not black but a brown warmth, night the color of weak tea.
I am not standing in this rain; the dark arm of a wiper at the bottom edge betrays my shelter, and the red smear at the left is some other traveller’s lamp. From the dry side of the glass I watch a house keep its own feast. Every door is shut. No figure crosses the wet gravel, which returns the glow faithfully, like a floor polished for dancers who never came. It is this that detains me: illumination without guests, a celebration addressed to the road, to anyone, to me by accident.
The photographer, born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, is the great portraitist of the house at night, and here the genre loosens into reverie. He numbers rather than names, 10789-2109, as if feelings could be catalogued; SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney keep the catalogue’s pages. In the archival pigment print the colors stay dissolved, sugared, wet. I think of every December I spent inside looking out, or outside looking in; the photograph declines to choose between them, and neither, any longer, do I.
Rain owns this picture; the colored lights merely rent it. Strung along the eaves of the low building, green, gold, red and blue, they ought to mean festivity, but the wet windshield melts each bulb into a long streak of color, candy pulled soft by water. The weather, not the electrician, decides what shines here, what smears, what survives. Above, the sky is not black but a brown warmth, night the color of weak tea.
I am not standing in this rain; the dark arm of a wiper at the bottom edge betrays my shelter, and the red smear at the left is some other traveller’s lamp. From the dry side of the glass I watch a house keep its own feast. Every door is shut. No figure crosses the wet gravel, which returns the glow faithfully, like a floor polished for dancers who never came. It is this that detains me: illumination without guests, a celebration addressed to the road, to anyone, to me by accident.
The photographer, born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, is the great portraitist of the house at night, and here the genre loosens into reverie. He numbers rather than names, 10789-2109, as if feelings could be catalogued; SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney keep the catalogue’s pages. In the archival pigment print the colors stay dissolved, sugared, wet. I think of every December I spent inside looking out, or outside looking in; the photograph declines to choose between them, and neither, any longer, do I.