Lynn Saville: Dark City

Arthur Danto has described Lynn Saville as New York’s answer to Eugène Atget, because she prowls her city at the other end of the day, picking up pieces of the past in the present, just before it is swallowed by shadows. For her new monograph, Dark City, Saville focused on vacant spaces–shuttered storefronts, back alleys, blank billboards, empty lots–with the occasional ghostly figure hurrying through the frame. Working at twilight and dawn with a medium-format camera (setting up her tripod quickly so as not to attract police attention), Saville captured busy city streets depopulated and emptied out, industrial spaces and storefronts alike gone quiet. Color and light come from the sky, streetlights, neon signs or surveillance lighting. Seemingly otherworldly, the images in Dark City also tell a more pragmatic story of the changing urban landscape–vacancies caused by financial crisis, and construction projects spurred on by economic recovery, gentrification and development.
Dark City includes an introduction by acclaimed author Geoff Dyer and photographs taken across the US, including in Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Maine; Lowell, Massachusetts; Jersey City and the Meadowlands, as well as around New York City.
Lynn Saville is a New York-based photographer who specializes in photographs taken at twilight and dawn–the boundary times between night and day, as she calls them. Saville studied at the Pratt Institute and Duke University and is represented by Yancey Richardson in New York.