THE HOUR BETWEEN TIMES

When the clocks have been set back and the afternoon ends early, a city emerges—one that does not exist during the day. People are still sitting in their offices, standing at their machines, or working behind shop counters—yet outside, darkness has long since fallen. The windows of office buildings glow like honeycombs of cold light, while below, shop windows shimmer in a warm orange hue. These hours—when night has already arrived, but life still belongs to the day—defy any easy categorization. It is the city’s third state of being.

What makes this time unique is its duality. By midday, the city serves its functional purpose: it is a marketplace, a transit artery, a place of work. By midnight, it is shut tight; its facades become nothing more than shells. But in the early evening twilight of November and December, the city oscillates between these two states. One can still see what the city was built for—while simultaneously glimpsing what it becomes when no one is watching. The people one encounters here are no longer mere passersby, yet they are not lost souls either: the baker turning on his lights around 4:30 as the last office workers head home; the cleaning crew in the illuminated upper floors of empty administrative buildings; the group at a bus stop—silent, yet sharing something profound: the act of waiting.
Perhaps it is precisely this simultaneity that sustains the project: the weary, unsentimental poetry of a city that keeps working even after the daylight has faded. Night does not strip the city bare; rather, it cloaks it in a new guise. What was a visible structure under the sun transforms at night into an atmosphere, a surface, a mere suggestion. And finally, there is the kinship between photography and darkness itself. Photography is always an engagement with what remains of the light—long exposures, wide apertures, a patient wait for the moment a bus passes by, inscribing its trail of light into the scene like a sign. During the dark season, the photographer is no longer an outsider, but a part of the time they are capturing: they, too, stand in the cold, in a state of transition, caught somewhere between two conditions.
The result is not a bleak image of the city, but an honest one. For these hours reveal the city as it exists when no one is projecting a positive spin upon it: simply there, illuminated and inhabited—halfway through the day, yet very much in the thick of life.