Katie Tobin Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark , ed. Shanay Jhavari, (Koenig Books, 2024), 424 pages, £34 . .
Djuna Barnes mentioned that the nights of one period or city are not the nights of another. How do you see Night Fever illustrating these kinds of different experiences and representations of night? . That quote guided the selection of artists, photographers, and filmmakers that I wanted to feature in the book.
It so clearly articulated what I had personally felt, and wanted the book to channel and communicate – the night is different in different contexts. The selection of work in the book starting from 1960 is by a group of international and intergenerational artists, filmmakers and photographers confirms that the experience of the night for an individual or group happens differently and can be suffused with a range of emotional and physical experiences – joy, ecstasy, pain, fear, anxiety, mystery, tedium , inertia, exhaustion, peace. For a person, group or place the threshold of the night, its liminal edge, is ever-changing dependent not only on actual conditions of light and darkness but also on the tenor of the socio-political environment.
Accordingly, the book includes work that uses the duration of a single night as a structuring principle, as well as works that are made over a succession of nights or those which are not made at night at all but evoke the night or find traces of it in the following day. Another quote here, but I really liked that.