Artist's Statement

Brian Kosoff

This project is a series of B&W landscape photographs produced at night

Humans are designed to be active in the daylight and seek protection at night, this results in a change of our perceptions at night. Some degree of anxiety and fear accompany us in the dark hours. But so does wonder.

Seeing the night sky has always given humans a sense of their scale and context in the universe, even awe. The sight of the stars and planets has influenced societies for millennia. The heavens were the worlds of the Gods. They foretold the future, we thought.

We are rarely able to see the vastness of the Universe and the familiar on Earth with equal detail at the same time as our eyes lack the dynamic range. Film can resolve this and further, the sense of our perpetual motion can be evidenced in the heavens with the aid of a camera. The concept that we are but souls on a ball hurtling threw space seems a little more comprehensible when the heavens spin above us.

From the standpoint of landscape photography the night sky can make objects and scenes more contradictory. Like the absurdity of a small fenced area amongst a vast plain, made even smaller by comparison to the universe above. The night sky can also lead one’s thoughts toward our mortality, our spiritual beliefs, or our place in the scheme of things. With this body of work I have attempted to create observations that might give rise to thoughts about all of those things.

I have used medium format and panoramic film cameras in this project with the intent to produce a portfolio of both silver gelatin and carbon pigment prints. There are currently 55 images in this ongoing project. For exhibition the prints would be carbon pigment and depending on the ratio of the print dimensions, rectangular or panoramic, would result in prints of 30 to 40” in width.