Steve Giovinco

Informed by the environment, history, and culture, “Interiors” are photographs of the haunting beauty of abandoned industrial interiors and surrounding land at night.

The focus is to trace evidence of the changing industrial landscape and capture a feeling of loss and mystery set in eerie decay. Beyond documentation, however, these dark photographs crystallize a sense of inertia taking place in urban American life.

As with nearly all my work, the photographs are taken in complete darkness with exposures of an hour or more, making it impossible to see through the camera’s viewfinder. Instead, I stand beside the tripod, “feeling” the image, intuitively framing it in the dark. By allowing my thoughts and fears to be part of the creative photographic process, I visualize this unfolding emotional experience, capturing mystery.

Artistic inspiration comes from photographers capturing changing worlds such as Eugène Atget’s Nineteenth-Century Paris and Carlton Watkins’ American West, and those working at night such as Brassai, who photographed Paris in the 1930s. Hudson River School painters such as Frederic Edwin Church and paintings by Edward Hopper are also of interest, as are the films of Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Italian Neo-Realist films.

This project is part of a long-term global series spanning history, environmentalism, and beauty, representing an arc of photographs taken at twilight and night, linked to landscape photographs on climate change Greenland, the Arctic, American West, and France.