Since 2020, I have been living part-time at The Sea Ranch on the Northern California coast. With an unobstructed panoramic view of sea and sky, it’s the perfect setting to photograph twilight, the time of day I find most captivating. In those fleeting minutes, vivid colors paint the sky with magic and mystery, briefly transporting me to another realm before vanishing at dusk.
Twilight refers not only to the soft glowing light in the sky when the sun slips below the horizon but also to a period of ambiguity or gradual decline. These literal and figurative meanings merge in my practice of photographing twilight while the pandemic, war, climate change, and political division disrupt our lives.
In this turbulent time, twilight has become a personal refuge, and photographing it a meditative act, a time to be still and to contemplate the effects of the sun’s rays refracting and scattering in the upper atmosphere. Are these photographs brief flirtations with the sublime, a kind of Rorschach test for evoking memories and emotions, or, simply, studies in color and light? These lyrical abstractions resonate differently with each viewer.
Making this series has filled me with a longing for things that, like twilight, seem so close and yet just out of reach. In this liminal space, I see an old world waning and the promise of a new one dawning.
Arthur Drooker is the author and photographer of American Ruins (Merrell, 2007), Lost Worlds: Ruins of the Americas (ACC, 2011), Pie Town Revisited (UNM Press, 2015), Conventional Wisdom (Glitterati, 2016), and City Hall (Schiffer, 2021). His work has been the subject of a feature story on CBS Sunday Morning and has been exhibited widely, including shows at
the Virginia Center for Architecture and the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC. For more information, please visit arthurdrooker.com
Twilight
by Arthur Droker
ISBN: 979-8218198039
Hardcover with 96 pages
Size: 9 x 12 inches
Language: English
Essay: Deborah Klochko
Publisher: Arthur Drooker
Publication date: 2023
Retail Price: $50
