Nightwatch

Noel Kerns is a Texas-based photographe. 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.

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In Night Watch: Painting with Light, photographer Noel Kerns brings us a glimpse into a nocturnal world of abandoned wastelands...both urban and rural. A deserted drive-in on the edge of forever, a decommissioned military base, a small town being consumed by its own toxic waste. Kerns uses a technique called Light-Painting to bring these decaying relics back to life, revealing latent details that lead our eyes and imaginations on a journey to a secret twilight zone where the ghosts of our discarded past rise from the ruins in a surreal spectacle of light. These photographs mark all that remain of failed ideas and broken things, artifacts of human enterprise vanishing even as the shutter falls. With light and dark, motion and stillness, Kerns shows us the forlorn, forgotten, often inexplicable things he finds in the isolated places that call to him in the night. Places that we too may visit, in Night Watch: Painting with Light.