In 1998 I enrolled in an intermediate photography class at MU with Professor Oliver Schuchard. Our class assignment was to create and submit a topic for the end of semester portfolio. For reasons both pragmatic and creative, nighttime offered me the best opportunity to wander our city’s streets in search of inspiration and vision, so I selected Night Photography as my topic and began to photograph downtown Columbia in earnest. This portfolio topic chosen 28 years ago led to an obsession with night photography and to a long-term project to document downtown Columbia at night. The earliest photographs in this body of work stretch back to 1996, with creative peaks occurring in 1998, 2001, 2003, 2011, and 2013. From 1996 to 2010 I was making my photographs on film with a manual focus camera and a tripod. In 2010 I shifted over to digital image making and moved away from the use of black and white film and a tripod in much of my photography.
When I started photographing Columbia at night, I was on a quest to find scenes that displayed the visual magic and the poetry of a city after dark. I was fascinated by the beauty revealed by the darkness of night, and I recognized the power of darkness to transform the quotidian into something elegant and mysterious.
In 2009, when I moved back to Columbia and began working on night photography again, my drive and my purpose shifted from artistic fascination to historic preservation. The Columbia that I had photographed in the late 1990s was changing, and features of the architectural landscape were disappearing and being replaced. My goal was now very clear, and it was to document the Columbia I knew before it changed and disappeared. The images displayed in this exhibit range from artistic fascination to historic preservation, and my hope is that the body of work will help to preserve the history, the architecture, and the beauty of nighttime Columbia.