New Project: Hotel Rooms

Hotel rooms, at night in the dark, are alive with light.

I made these images on the 10,000 mile cross-country tip I undertook this past fall. Each night, no matter how late I arrived at a hotel, no matter how tired, I spent the first forty-five minutes before I unpacked photographing the room with the lamps out. There was plenty of light, though the exposures were often four minutes, sometimes eight minutes long.

This project wasn’t on my main agenda—I was busy shooting other projects during the day and I just thought that I would make use of all the hotels in some way. It turns out that this project is one I find exceedingly rewarding.

From the larger set of images I printed fourteen, to capture the core spirit of the project, and those prints have a glow, a sense of something hard to put into words that I hope comes across on the screen. Ideally you’ll want to view these in a room with the lights dimmed so the magic can be more fully revealed.

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