How much light do we need at night? What is necessary or sufficient? And what is excessive or redundant night lighting? To find understanding in the use of night lighting, I explored the cities of light Paris and London, through the lens of my own photographic process. Exactly these cities are visited because of their historical significance: London first applied gas lighting on a large scale in 1807. Less than a century later, in 1878, electric street lighting was first switched on in Paris. The latter has forever changed the way we experience cities at night.
The project’s name refers to a numerical system that photographers used in the 1950s to determine the right exposure settings for a ‘correct’ photo. Van den Ende played with this given and developed a conceptual and technical methodology in which the control over the exposure value is handed over to the present light itself. Leaving images where the midtones and highlights ‘overflow.’ In this way, he wants to show the physical and direct relationship between the photo, the amount of light, and the location where the image is captured. The slashed ‘zero’ denotes the indispensable condition for letting photographic images exist at all— for without light, there’s no photography. Conversely, an overload of light may cease the photograph from existing.
