Night Photography History

Muses from the Past: The Night Photographs of Volkmar Kurt Wentzel

Analyzing classic photographs can be an effective way to progress in one’s own work. The key is not to simply mimic someone else’s great ideas, but to use the knowledge that comes with reproducing the work of masters and move on to create something new. With this in mind, National Parks at Night's Lance Keimig offers this ongoing series highlighting some of the early masters of night photography. We'd love to see any photographs you create after learning more about the pioneers of this niche—please share in the comments section!


The great Hungarian photographer Brassai is arguably the most influential night photographer of all time, particularly due to his work during the 1930s after the release of his seminal book, Paris De Nuit. I was introduced to Brassai while studying with Steve Harper in San Francisco in the late 1980s, shortly after Paris De Nuit was reprinted in the classic Parthenon edition in 1987.

Last year I wrote about Howard Burdekin and John Morrison, who paid a backhanded compliment to Brassai in their own book London Night. The English photographer Bill Brandt admired and even copied Brassai’s night work. But this article is not about Brassai, but rather about Volkmar Kurt Wentzel, a German American photographer who also found inspiration in the pages of Brassai’s Parisian nocturnes.

“Lafayette Square.” A silhouetted sculpture of Andrew Jackson on a rearing horse opposite the North Portico of the White House. Wentzel used an exposure that kept the sculpture in shadow, but preserved the detail of the illuminated White House. As was typical of this series, Wentzel chose to photograph on a wet and foggy night, a strategy that he no doubt observed in the night work of Brassai, and perhaps in Stieglitz’s as well.

Wentzel moved to America in 1926 at the age of 9, when his father, an amateur photographer and photo chemical salesman from Dresden, Germany, was offered a job as director of an Ansco photographic paper manufacturing plant in New York. Wentzel’s mother died a few years later, after which he set off with a friend on foot for South America.

After three days of walking and hitch-hiking, they found themselves in Washington, D.C., where the two parted ways. The friend went home to his mother, and Wentzel rented a room in Lafayette Square near the White House. He found a job working in the darkroom of Underwood & Underwood portraiture studio and news agency, where he also assisted the staff photographers. His first break came when one of his images was published in a Washington newspaper.

“The Waterfront.” The Washington canal was where fishermen delivered and sold their catch from the Chesapeake Bay to the restaurants and wealthy homes of Washington, D.C. In this image, a fisherman shows his catch to a customer in the shadow of the Washington Monument.

“National Archives.” The National Archives building had just been completed in 1935 when Wentzel made this image on a foggy night. Two groups of people illustrate the grand scale of the building, and the looming presence of the bare trees in the foreground add an air of mystery to the image.

After being given a copy of Paris De Nuit by a friend, Wentzel began to photograph the well-known landmarks of D.C. at night. He often would process his images the same night, and then go out again to reshoot to improve his exposures, often staying out until dawn.

Wentzel’s next big break came in 1936 when a chance tour of the photographic facilities of National Geographic led him to discover that there was a job opening. He fortuitously had some of his night prints with him, and was granted an interview and then the job.

“U.S. Capitol.” Shot on a rainy night, the squares in the plaza reflect a darker side of the dome of the Capitol. There is a great irony in our majestic Capitol building–– the finial atop the dome is a nearly 20-foot statue of a woman titled “Freedom,” designed by sculptor Thomas Crawford, and cast in bronze by slave labor in 1863.

“The Mall.” The classic view of Washington: the Capitol peeking out from behind the Washington Monument as viewed from between the columns of the Lincoln Memorial. The shadowy figure in the foreground is Wentzel’s friend Eric Menke, the man who gave him his copy of Barassai’s book.

“Pennsylvania Avenue.” An image made on a snowy night from behind the gates of the Treasury building to the Capitol. Note the reflections off of the street car tracks, and the trails from car headlights, but not tail lights. Perhaps tail lights didn’t yet exist in the 1930s, or they were so dim as to not register on Wentzel’s film. The tower on the right is the old post office.

Although he was hired as a darkroom technician, in less than a year Wentzel had an opportunity to complete an assignment for the magazine when a photographer was pulled from a job in West Virginia for another story. Wentzel had spent time in West Virginia, and his familiarity landed him the assignment. It was the beginning of a career that spanned nearly 50 years at the magazine, where he photographed 45 stories and authored 10. He traveled extensively in Africa and Asia, and was later named the director of the National Geographic archives, where he was responsible for saving millions of images that had been destined for the rubbish bin.

Wentzel did not photograph extensively at night after his early Washington images, but they were shown at the Royal Photographic Society in England and at other venues in Europe before being published in the April 1940 issue of National Geographic. An exhibition of the work was presented by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and published in book form as Washington By Night in 1992.

“Decatur House.” A shallow depth of field detail image of Decatur House at the corner of Jackson Place and H Street in Lafayette Square. The square had long been one of the most prestigious addresses in Washington, with the residences of presidents, vice presidents, secretaries of state, and other wealthy and powerful people. Wentzel planted the light bulb behind the frame of the lamp to minimize overexposure, but the light bled out from the sides all the same. You can just make out a row of late-1930s cars in the middle ground.

“National Archives II.” A dramatic image of the sculpture “Guardianship” by James Earle Fraser, best-known as the designer of the buffalo nickel. Fraser’s sculpture graces many of the buildings constructed during the New Deal era. Beneath the sculpture is a quote by Thomas Jefferson: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Careful placement of a light source behind the sculpture adds to the drama.

Wentzel died in 2006 at age 92. Unfortunately, little is known about the technical aspects of his early night work, other than that he printed it at Underwood & Underwood studios, “surreptitiously using their best portrait paper” (as he writes in his book). He used a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, occasionally supplementing the existing light with flashbulbs that, as he wrote, “were in fashion at the time.”

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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A Look Through the Years—How Night Photography has Changed, and How it Hasn't

Lance Keimig, "Sand Pit," 2016. This image could have been made 30 years ago when I started photographing at night, but it was shot a year ago, in October of 2016.

Recently Chris and I were chatting about how various aspects of night photography have changed with the advances in technology, and how others haven’t. It was a lively conversation, and he suggested that I write a blog post on the subject. I thought it was a great idea, especially as it would allow me to talk about my favorite subject: historic night photographers!

Delay Tactics

One of my favorite early night photography stories is about the English photographer Paul Martin, who began photographing at night in earnest in 1895. Others had made the occasional foray into night photography before him, but it was Martin who really set the wheels in motion, and whose work caught the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and his colleagues at the Camera Club of New York.

Martin wrote in his 1939 autobiography, Victorian Snapshots, that at one point he had decided to continue to photograph in darkening conditions after the sun went down, making longer and longer exposures and altering his development to get the best results. Eventually these early night images were published as the book London by Gaslight.

Like with most pioneers or innovators, the general public seemed to think Martin was crazy. People approached to tell him that it wasn’t possible to take pictures in the dark, and that he should go home to his wife, or maybe back to the asylum! On more than one occasion he was accosted by the “bobbies,” who questioned his motives.

These are experiences shared by almost anyone who has been photographing at night for more than a few years. Though, for better or worse, night photography has become so commonplace today that unless you find yourself on the wrong side of a fence, you rarely have to explain your motives to the police or anyone else.

Paul Martin, "A wet night on the embankment," 1895. Martin covered his camera lens during the exposure to shield it from a curious policeman’s lantern.

Back in the 1890s, police carried kerosene lanterns with them on their beats, because flashlights (or what the British call “torches”) hadn’t been invented yet. On more than one occasion, Martin had a long exposure ruined when a policeman walked in front of his camera and raised a lantern to get a better look at the photographer and his gear. (Remember that in those days, street lights were dimmer, and far fewer in number, so the nighttime environment was considerably darker in London than it is today.) Eventually Martin was able to anticipate and react to impending disaster by removing his hat and placing it over the lens until the policeman’s curiosity was satisfied!

New Jersey Photographer Laureate George Tice’s best-known image is the remarkable “Petit’s Mobile Station, Cherry Hill, NJ, 1974.” Tice told me some years ago that the 2-minute exposure on 8x10-inch film actually required about 10 minutes to make because he had to cover the lens whenever cars passed in front of the camera. He would get only 10 or 15 seconds of exposure on the film before a car pulled into the station or passed on the road on the left side of the image. Each and every time, he covered the lens.

George Tice, "Petit’s Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, NJ, 1974." Tice’s best-known image was a 2-minute exposure on 8x10 film that took 10 minutes to expose because the photographer had to repeatedly cover his lens due to cars passing through the scene.

No doubt many of us have employed this same device used by Martin and Tice to prevent an unwanted car or plane trail in our compositions; it’s something I’ve done for decades in my own images. Some things never change.

But most do.

Deliberation

Many of the changes in night photography since digital replaced film are obvious. The ability to “chimp” is a good example. Night photography has become far more accessible because of the instant feedback we get from the image preview, the blinking highlights and the histogram.

Other related changes are less obvious unless you have had the experience of shooting at night with film. There is certainly a great satisfaction in knowing that you’ve “got the shot,” but what is lost is the sense of anticipation that comes from not knowing until you unwind the wet film from the reel in the darkroom.

Working so deliberately usually leads to a higher success rate, and that’s one aspect of my field workflow that I have maintained as much as possible.

The combination of low sensitivity and reciprocity failure meant that night photographers shooting film were lucky to make 10 or 15 exposures per night, and without the ability to review images in the field, we generally took a slow and methodical approach to our work. When considering variations for exposure uncertainty and complex light painting, a good night meant one or two “keepers.” Working so deliberately usually leads to a higher success rate, and that’s one aspect of my field workflow that I have maintained as much as possible over the years. Still, there have been nights in the digital age when I’ve made over 100 exposures––quite a lot for a night photographer.

Justification

I have already alluded to one of the other changes I’ve noticed over the course of my career. Back in the 1990s, I would be questioned all of the time by passers-by wondering what I could be photographing in the dark. Non-photographers would say things like, “There isn’t any light, how can you take a picture?” or “Are you a ghost hunter?” or “There’s nothing there, why are you photographing that old building?” Sometimes I still get those questions, and if the person seems genuinely interested, at least now I can show them the back of the camera.

That leads to another change worth noting. I used to carry a small selection of prints in my camera bag to show to the police or security guards who invariably caught me on the wrong side of the fence. More than once, being able to show a print or two along with a business card eased the concern of the authorities and kept me from being arrested, or at least from being detained. They could somehow understand that an “artist” with a camera was not a threat. In the jittery years following 9/11, that was a real concern. Although to my knowledge there has never been a terrorism event that involved photography, somehow night photographers have often been suspected of bad intent.

Balboa Park. It looks like they mean it.

Gear

We all know how much technology has changed the way we work. Our cameras have improved to the point where almost any can record sharp images of the Milky Way, whereas cameras used to be limited to long exposures and star trails. Moreover, lenses are sharper, batteries last longer, tripods are lighter and flashlights are brighter.

Until very recently, one incredibly frustrating camera feature remained stubbornly stuck at 30 seconds: the shutter speed dial! Over the years, I’ve spoken with numerous camera company reps about why their camera’s shutter speeds don’t go any longer than 30 seconds, and unfailingly I’d get the same answer: “Why would you need to expose for longer than 30 seconds? You could just raise the ISO.” Despite the relative ease and lack of engineering required to enable longer shutter speeds, it wasn’t until the Nikon D750 that we even had a Time setting at our disposal.

Many recent cameras have built-in intervalometers, but again with exposures limited to 30 seconds. Finally, with the release of the Canon 5D Mark IV and 6D Mark II, we have DSLRs with programmable shutter speeds that extend exposures not just to minutes, but as long as 99 hours! Hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit with their future models.

Color

Mixed lighting was always the bane of architectural photographers, especially when natural color rendering was important. For night photographers, it’s often that same mixed lighting that attracts us to a scene in the first place. The early work of photographer Jan Staller was a major influence on me, and his technique of printing to correct for one light source while allowing the others to do what they would created some of the most surreal images I had ever seen.

Lance Keimig, "Mixed Lighting Examples," 1995. These two images were shot on Fuji color negative film in 1995 under a combination of sodium and mercury vapor lights. There is no right or wrong white balance here–– whatever looks right to the photographer, is right.

The incredible control we have over color in our pictures, and the flexibility to set white balance after the image has been captured, both give today’s photographer a flexibility that was inconceivable only 20 years ago. Back then, if you couldn’t control the light sources, you either shot black and white or accepted the crazy colors as they were recorded.

Composition

One thing that hasn’t changed—and will never change—are the principles of composition and design. A good photograph will always be a good photograph, and a crummy one will always be a crummy one regardless of the technology that was used to create it. For that, we can sleep well in the morning.

Lance Keimig, Stromness, 2008. Shot on Fuji Neon Across 120 film with an Ebony 23SW view camera and Nikkor 65mm f/4 lens. 10 minutes, f11. This image was made in the tiny fishing village of Stromness on Orkney in northern Scotland. It was the house of the poet George Mackay Brown. The technology doesn’t matter, the image works because of the combination of vision and craft.

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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Muses from the Past—Lighting and Night Photography of the Vargas Brothers

All images by Carlos and Miguel Vargas

All images by Carlos and Miguel Vargas

Back in October, I wrote about Harold Burdekin and John Morrison, two English photographers who published a beautiful book of night photographs of London in 1933 after seeing the Parisian night work of Brassai. By studying the innovations and inspirations of the night photographers of yesterday, we can better understand the roots of our art form, to learn and to progress in our own work.

This article is the second in a series on underappreciated photographers who have made a significant contribution to the genre. Perhaps no one better fits the bill than Carlos and Miguel Vargas of Arequipa, Peru.

Carlos and Miguel Vargas

Carlos and Miguel Vargas

The Vargas brothers opened their studio in 1912, after apprenticing for Max T. Vargas, an unrelated photographer who ran the busiest photo studio in Arequipa at the turn of the century.

The Estudio de Arte Vargas Hermanos was almost immediately successful. The 1910s and ’20s were a vibrant time in Arequipa. The flamboyant brothers were at the epicenter of a fashionable society created by the newfound wealth and exposure to European styles brought to the southern Andes. Artists, poets, writers and musicians passed through the brothers’' studio, which became a center for art and culture in the city. Their night photography adventures evolved into highbrow social events for their bohemian entourage.

The core of their business was portraits of the city’s elite, but their photographic legacy is much broader–– a remarkable photographic record of the last years of an elegant and formal society that would soon be lost to the restless hum of modernity and the cold economic reality of the Great Depression.

Their work is a testament to Peruvian society in the first half of the 20th century, but their contribution to night photography cannot be understated. The nocturnes of the Vargas brothers mark several firsts in the history of night photography.

the Crossing.jpg

First, the careful staging and choreography of their images had not been seen in nocturnal imagery before. Many of their night works included significant numbers of people, each one carefully placed and instructed to remain still for exposures that lasted up to an hour. The brothers were inspired by silent films, and acted like directors on a film set to produce narrative images that were reflective of their imaginations as much as of the time and place in which they were made.

It’s well-known that Bill Brandt staged night photographs to try to recreate some of Brassai’s images, even going so far as to pose his own wife Eva as a stand-in for the prostitute from one of Brassai’s images. Until the discovery of the Vargas nocturnes, it was assumed that Brandt was the first to stage night photos in the early 1930s. But Carlos and Miguel had him beat by about 15 years, and did so in extraordinary fashion!

In order to execute their complex photographs, the brothers needed to use added lighting. As far back as the 1860s, photographers such as Nadar in France and Charles Piazzi Smyth in Egypt had used artificial light to supplement their low-light photographs, but it was not until the work of the Vargas brothers that added light was used with aesthetic considerations.

The brothers understood that light could be used to create mood and atmosphere in a way that had never been done before–– at least outside of a studio. They placed lights in various places within the scene, often employing backlighting for dramatic effect.

Their cinematic vision combined long exposures taken in moonlight with strategically placed lights within the image. They used bonfires, car headlights, magnesium flashes and moonlight, in whatever combination served their needs. The combination of long exposures with flash powder was also new. Prior to the Vargas images, flash-lit photographs tended to be short exposures with the flash at or near the camera, resulting in the familiar on-camera strobe look that we are all familiar with. The brothers, however, used light flashes creatively.

The Vargas brothers used their technical mastery, ingenuity and creative vision to produce a dazzling portfolio of night photographs between about 1919 and 1930. Approximately 75 5x7-inch glass plate negatives, and just a few vintage prints, survive today.

Without the determined efforts of Houston-based photo historian Peter Yenne, it is likely that this remarkable body of work would have never been known. Yenne has worked for more than 20 years to discover and promote the work of early South American photographers. Beginning in 1999 he and Peruvian photographer Adelma Benavente inventoried, restored and scanned over 15,000 glass plate negatives from the archives of Estudios de Arte Hermanos Vargas that had been stored in cardboard boxes for decades.

The exhibition “City of Night: The Vargas Brothers of Arequipa, Peru 1919-1930” was on view at Houston FotoFest from November 30, 2006, to January 20, 2007, and travelled to several other venues. Hopefully the brother’s photography will continue to draw interest, and they will be awarded their rightful place in the historical record.

For now, I hope that you enjoy the images shown here, courtesy of Peter Yenne.

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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Muses from the Past—the Night Photos of Burdekin and Morrison

In my last post, I wrote about the passing of my mentor, Steve Harper. The way that I teach my own classes and workshops has been greatly influenced by the time I spent studying with Steve in the late 1980s and early 90s. One of the ways that his influence comes through is that I usually begin my workshops with a (not always) brief overview of the history of night photography.

Steve felt strongly that having an appreciation of the challenges faced by the pioneers of night photography—and at least a passing familiarity with some early nocturnal imagery—was not only interesting, but was also an important aspect of his students developing their own “Night Vision.”

I agree, and I also think that studying the work of others is a great way to learn, and to advance one’s own photography. Analyzing and perhaps even attempting to recreate classic photographs can be an effective way to progress in one’s own work. Even the renowned English photographer Bill Brandt copied some night images by his contemporary Brassai—going so far as to use his own wife as a stand-in for the prostitute in one of Brassai’s photographs!

London Night, by Harold Burdekin and John Morrison

London Night, by Harold Burdekin and John Morrison

The key is not to simply mimic someone else’s great ideas, but to take the knowledge that comes with reproducing the work of masters and move on to create something new. With this in mind, I’m beginning a series of articles highlighting some of my favorite night photographers. Let’s begin by looking at the work of Harold Burdekin and John Morrison.

Unfortunately, little is known about the lives of Burdekin and Morrison. In 1934 they published a remarkable book of night photographs of London that was at least in part inspired by Brassai, who had published the first book ever of night photographs, Paris de Nuit, just the year before. In London Night, Burdekin is credited as the photographer, and Morrison as the assistant and author of the accompanying essay.

Study Burdekin and Morrison’s photographs ... see what you can emulate in their execution.

Burdekin was killed by a falling bomb in London in 1944. Another book of his photographs was published posthumously in 1948. As for Morrison, he was never heard from again. That’s about all there is, except of course for the photographs.

London Night is a beautiful book, sumptuously printed in blue photogravure— the same process that was used for Brassai’s book. In Morrison’s introductory essay to London Night, he references Paul Morand’s opening essay to Brassai’s Paris de Nuit, agreeing with Morand that night is more than the opposite of day. Morrison rhapsodizes throughout his essay about the mysterious and romantic qualities of the night, and it is a fine introduction to the photographs, which also present a highly romanticized and soulful view of pre-war London.

Despite remaining largely unknown, the art of London Night represents one of the finest collections of night photographs of the 20th century. The images are technically perfect, and the compositions are balanced and hold the viewer’s attention, leading the viewer into this dreamy world of shadows.

The photographs convey a dark and lonely city, quiet and seemingly devoid of life. All of the images were made on foggy nights, the fog blending with the soot and smoke from a thousand coal fires in the city. The empty streets are thick with atmosphere, timeless, full of mystery and the unknown. It’s not hard to imagine Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty locked in their game of cat and mouse, slipping through the streets of these photographs. In short, the images capture the sentiments that are nearly universal to night photographers.

I encourage you to study Burdekin and Morrison's photographs and see what you can articulate about their effectiveness, see what you can emulate in their execution. Perhaps venture into your own city or town, and experiment to try to recreate what you like most about their style. The experience will at the very least be fun, and may even spark some changes in how you pursue seizing the night.

Lance Keimig has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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