Cameras Need Not Sleep: Dhruv Malhotra

Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, Koenig Books / The Shoestring Publisher, 2024

‘Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark’ is the first significant publication to focus on photographic and cinematic works from the 1960s to the present that use night as the starting point for their explorations.

A lavishly illustrated compendium, ‘Night Fever’ is committed to those lens-based practices that have found in the night the opportunity to rejoice and rebel, but also to seek rest, refuge and perhaps some revelation.

Collectively, these films and photo portfolios, as well as the newly commissioned essays and texts from an international and cross-generational group of scholars, critics and curators, stress that there is no single night. For a person, place or group, night’s threshold, its liminal edge, is ever-changing, dependent not only on the actual conditions of light and dark, but also on the tenor of the socio-political environment.

The films and photographs in ‘Night Fever’ assert that for each person, place or group the night happens differently, and can be suffused with a range of emotional and physical experiences – joy, ecstasy, pain, fear, anxiety, mystery, tedium, inertia, exhaustion, and peace.

Edited by Shanay Jhavari, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, London. Jhaveri was previously Associate Curator of International Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

David Campany contributes a short text ‘Cameras Need Not Sleep’ on Dhruv Malhotra’s series Sleepers and After Party.