From Golden Light to Blue: Photographing Sunset and Twilight in Your Neighborhood

Lynn Saville is a fine-art photographer who specializes in photographing cities and rural settings at twilight and dawn, what she calls “the boundary times between night and day.” Her photographs have been published in four monographs: Acquainted with the Night (Rizzoli), Night/Shift (Monacelli), Dark City (Damiani), and Lost New York (KGP).

Saville’s work has been widely exhibited and praised. The following favorable notice of her retrospective exhibition at the Pratt Institute Photography Gallery appeared in The New Yorker: “There’s a long, rich history of New York photographers working at night, from Berenice Abbott to Joel Meyerowitz. Saville joins their ranks with these pictures …” Arthur C. Danto compared Saville’s work to Atget’s photographs of early-morning Paris: “Saville is his New York counterpart, the Atget of vanishing New York, prowling her city at the other end of the day …” In his recent book of essays, See/Saw: Looking at Photographs, Geoff Dyer wrote of Saville’s work, “The pristine silence, the lack of motion in these very still photographs, create the sense of a world that has dropped out of time—and therefore out of the cycle of transactions.”

In her Zoom and in-person classes on twilight photography, Saville teaches observational and composition techniques, shares tips on lenses and camera settings, and helps students appreciate the shifting balance between natural and artificial light. She also conveys her sense of wonder at this mysterious time between day and night.