Great Moments in Overhead Lighting
2005-ongoing
In 2005, the P and I ended up in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in Malaysia, staying at the only cheap hotel in town. The room was really narrow and hot, but with a high ceiling: while lying flat on my back in bed, I fixated on the mundane overhead fluorescent tube and the ceiling fan. This hotel became the beginning of a new habit of documenting bad overhead lighting whenever I thought of it, wherever I happened to be.
Around the same time, I acquired my first digital camera, and made the big switch from printed images to simply looking at them on computer screens. This also really changed things, somehow. There’s something about the way that images, particularly images of lights, look when photographed and viewed entirely digitally: the luminescence feels entirely different than with print images. My fascination with lighting has much to do with the way in which it completely, passively dominates the way we experience things looking, and so I thought I’d try to look at it more directly, as well.
