Color Me Night was born of four years of travel across four continents. From the U.S. to Europe to Thailand, China, Japan, India, Iran, Kenya, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the border between Sudan and Chad, I covered conflict and environmental issues as a documentary or press photographer. But I also just plain roved the earth. Many of the photographs I selected were grabbed at moments of ease, after all my pictures had been filed, or when a story ended and I had time to see life from a more casual perspective, or perhaps I was just on holiday somewhere or shooting daily life. After spending a few months putting some order in my archives last year, I decided to make a book from a thread that emerged – only photographs taken at night.
Some kind of magic happens when the sun goes down. Shadows play tricks on your eyes, colors take on a richness and depth, forms become blurred and abstract, more painterly. The obscurity lends itself to a kind of reverie, and I couldn’t resist running away with the idea of making a by night travel journal, if you will, as if I had lived my life as a dream. The book is a collection of images, words, memories, and rewritten glories; moments lived under the cover of night when the world goes to sleep, and another one awakens. The essays are not meant to tell the story of the persons pictured, but rather, they narrate the textural memory I formed of certain intervals or events around the time I made the photographs. This is a personal endeavour, and a big departure from my documentary reporting, though that work continues as well.
Anne Holmes is a freelance photojournalist based in France, specializing in conflict, environmental and human rights issues, working largely in Africa, the Middle East and Western Asia for NGO, editorial and corporate clients.
All Rights Reserved
