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Photographer David Allee explores the harsh but ethereal effect of
artificial light on man-made environments.
By Peter Hall
May 2003
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Allee climbed onto the roof of a bowling alley across
the street from Yankee Stadium to capture the intensity of light spilled
onto apartment houses near the ballpark. (September 2002)
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The picnic area of the Red Rooster, a 1950s-style fast-food restaurant
in Brewster, New York. (April 2002)
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This image, taken from the bowling alley rooftop, looks across the Number
4 subway tracks and into Yankee Stadium during the early innings of a game
in late September 2002.
David Allee
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A Yankees season ticket holder, photographer David Allee began to notice
as he emerged from the subway at 161st Street for games that the apartment
windows adjacent to the stadium were bathed in a sea of spilled artificial
light. So one evening last fall he brought his camera and tripod along to
a game and persuaded the owner of a nearby bowling alley to let him climb
up to the roof. Focusing his lens on the buildings overlooking the ballpark,
Allee noticed that residents did not seem to be enjoying their ringside
seats. "Most of the people who live there have their shades drawn,"
Allee says. "I thought they'd be watching the game. But maybe if you've
lived there your whole life, the light becomes a nuisance."
The intrusive otherworldly effect of artificial light on man-made environments
is the theme of Allee's ongoing "White Nights" series. Working
with a large-format Linhof Technikardan camera, he positions himself in
front of apartment buildings, houses, and gardens that are bathed in the
overflow of floodlights from sports and recreation facilities.
Using shutter speeds of two to three minutes, Allee subjects his film
to the kind of intense light that turns night into an unnatural day, producing
images that seem to capture a state between times and seasons. A photograph
of a floodlit picnic area behind a 1950s-style drive-in presents a
Christmas pine tree before a wintry treeless background garnished with the
unnaturally luminous yellow of daffodils in full bloom. It seems to be neither
winter or spring, night or day.
Shooting by the bright night of theatrical illumination is nothing new in
the history of photography. Brassaï's "Paris de Nuit" series
caught the city's nocturnal characters in the mysterious, romantic radiance
of incandescent light. Philip-Lorca diCorcia has employed giant klieg lights
to illuminate portraits with a hyperreal cinematic glow. However, Allee's
lighting is found rather than staged; his scenes have more of the deadpan
feel of contemporary art photography. But if the influential German
school led by Hilla and Bernd Becher and their protégés Thomas
Struth and Andreas Gursky has permeated Allee's approach, his images are
not about typologies or the act of seeing. They have more to do with the
effect artificial daylight has on the places in which we live and play.
Allee, 33, gave up a career as an urban planner to pursue photography, enrolling
in the MFA program at New York's School of Visual Arts. He first began
to notice the impact of large artificial light sources in the suburbs
while driving at night to his family's weekend home in Connecticut. Field
House (this month's cover image) features a house in Amenia, New York,
illuminated by a baseball field behind and the feeble glare of Allee's
car headlights in front. Rural and suburban settings, Allee notes, are often
more dramatically affected by artificial light than their urban counterparts:
"So much of the city is lit up, and these huge lights don't travel
very far."
Allee has begun an inventory of New York's brightest spots by observing
the city from the air during descents into La Guardia Airport. Wherever
there's bright light, he has discovered, security uniforms usually are not
far behind. Halfway through the Yankee Stadium shoot, Allee found himself
dusting off an old student ID to convince ten swiftly alerted cops patrolling
on adjacent rooftop that he was doing a school project. Investigating a
light-flooded driving range in Staten Island one night, Allee began
photographing what he thought was probably the largest barbed-wire fence
he had ever seen. Within minutes a flock of police cars, alerted by
hidden security cameras, had surrounded the unwitting photographer. He had
been photographing the fence of a state penitentiary. "They took me
back to the prison, and I had to talk to the warden, who actually took my
film," Allee laments. "It's a crime I guess, photographing
a prison."
The appeal of Allee's work is its ability to draw our attention to the formal
qualities of artificial light--an illumination that is at once magical
and ghastly. His plein air process lends a human element to the compositions
and reawakens us to urban-planning issues that we have a tendency to neglect.
The excess of light is something we rarely notice. It seems refreshingly
resourceful, then, that Allee repurposes this wasted light for his photographs,
reminding us at the same time of its existence. As the photographer W. Eugene
Smith once noted, "Available light is any damn light that is available."
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