Nightwatch

Noel Kerns is a Texas-based photographer who specializes in capturing ghost towns, decommissoned military bases, and industrial abandonments by night. His images incorporate two distinct photographic techniques: time-exposure by the natural light of a full moon, and the artful application of artificial light, vividly "painted" into the scene while the camera's shutter is open. "Light-painting is all about vision," says Kerns. "Or more accurately, pre-vison. It's the ability to imagine the scene you want to emerge from the darkness, and then to execute it in such a way as to match or surpass what you imagined." Nightwatch is the first book from Kerns, one of the world's foremost practitionerst of the art of light-painting. Join him as he ventures into the darkness of the American Southwest, exploring remote desert ghost towns under a full moon, or prowling the abandoned, seemingly post-apocalyptic structures of America's industrial wastelands. In his photographs, Kerns captures the world surreal: flowing cloudstreaks in a night sky, the laser-like light trails of cars racing by on a highway, a raging ocean shoreline rendered eerily calm through long exposure. Kerns shares with the reader a nocturnal world that reveals its dreamlike details only when time, moonlight, and the light-painter's hand combine to tell the story.