As the hours pass, the shadow of night glides gently across the globe adrift in the cosmos, lulling Beijing’s inhabitants to sleep just as New Yorkers rise on the other side, extinguishing Stockholm while dawn breaks over the Caribbean Sea.
The Earth is a two-faced planet, its hemispheres alternately bathed in light or plunged into darkness, its sky—blue or black depending on the moment—pierced either by a round yellow star or by a bright disk, now full, now a slender crescent.
Crowds thin out in the darkness, cats slip across motionless streets, drunks stagger beneath streetlights or doze on public benches. The clamor of cities softens slightly. Owl calls echo through the silence of state forests. In the distance, invisible waves crash onto the endless sandy beaches of Africa.
On summer evenings, while swallows twitter, thunderstorms gather and darken the sky above the Bay of Bengal. On winter evenings, bundled office workers stream out in single file from the glass towers of Tokyo or Manhattan.
High in the sky, the stroboscopic lights of airplanes pulse above the sleeping cities of America’s deserts. Down on the ground, at twilight, trains glide through farmland in fleeting lines of blurred light.
When the neon signs of Shinjuku blaze, when Venetian glows flicker, when the Eiffel Tower shimmers, when the ether turns brownish or becomes inky black, when offices empty and restaurants hum with life, when shops lower their metal shutters just before the velvet-red curtains of theaters rise, when some people go home, brood, doze, or melt into languor, and when others, outside, kiss and dance beneath the moon—the images waver and the silhouettes fade away.
About Thierry Clech
Thierry Clech was born in France and lives in Paris. He works exclusively with silver-based photography, and all his images are in black and white. He primarily photographs during his travels, including Japan, Istanbul, Hong Kong, India, the United States, Ukraine, Africa, and Nicaragua. His work has been exhibited in France and internationally. He has published several books, including Indian Lights (Kehrer Verlag), Istanbul (89books), and Sunset on Ukraine (Snoeck). He is also a novelist. [Official Website]
