Night Patrol

Night Patrol began in earnest in 1999. and I continued work on the project through 2004. The photographs were made after dark, most of them in small-town Arkansas. One could regard the images as documents, for they do indeed convey information about the places depicted. I prefer to think of them as evocations.

What I wanted to evoke is the mystery of an empty street at night. These towns aren’t entirely deserted—some function quite well in fact—but I gravitated toward the abandoned parts for the photographs. There’s an implicit narrative in a place with more past than purposeful present. I don’t believe pictures tell a story in any substantive way, but rather they can pose questions and suggest a range of possibilities. Here, scenes from the real world mingle with the imagination, like stage sets for a drama yet to be enacted.