Ambiguous Interior
A friend's MINI, a Hudson Valley street, and photographic lights laid on the seats pointing up. The blue was not the plan.
Rhinebeck, 2019
A friend’s MINI Cooper, parked under a streetlight in the Hudson Valley. She let me photograph it several ways over one night. This is one of two frames I kept.
Lights on the seats
I laid flat panel lights on the seats and aimed them up at the ceiling, then shot on a slow shutter. Nothing lights the car from outside. Everything you can see of it is coming from inside it.
The blue arrived in the correction
The streetlights overhead were the cheap sodium kind, and they threw a heavy orange cast over the whole scene. In processing I balanced the image against that light to neutralise it. Correcting the orange outside pushed the daylight-balanced panels inside the car hard the other way, and the cabin came out this blue.
I didn’t plan it and I couldn’t have produced it deliberately. It landed that way, and that is how I kept it.
What the dark is doing
Cars are usually sold with light: the whole body lit, softened, every panel shining. This is the opposite approach. The car is almost entirely absent from both frames — a rim of roof, a windshield, two headlights — and you still know its whole shape.
It’s like a vermouth barely hitting your martini. It’s a suggestion that shows the whole rest of the car without saying it.
The same night
