2025 was a really rough year. I lost several family members and my older brother had a stroke. My mother found him face up in their living room face smashed in and covered in blood. Apparently as he fell after passing out he smashed his face on the side of the coffee table. Apologies for the graphic description. He is doing well now though but relearning how to walk.
In the midst of episodic tragedies I noticed that as a photographer the colors seemed washed out of the world. The sunlit world seemed gray and drab. For some odd reason, one day I found myself walking down Broadway on an early fall night and I started to notice the light and color of night time. As most experienced digital photographers are aware of, all cameras have a white balance setting of “Auto”, which automatically converts tungsten light or any other type of artificial light to daylight. On that night I decided to set my camera to “Daylight” balance (usually its the “sun” symbol in the White Balance menu). What this did is let the camera record artificial light as it’s true color temperature. All of a sudden I started seeing oranges and greens and yellows all over. I found it beautiful and very reminiscent of colors found in the photographs of Todd Hido (see my last post).
Inspiration can come from almost anywhere. I usually find titles for my work from reading widely; poetry to physics. Usually there is a phrase or word that seems really intriguing and I write it down to investigate further. English words have a way of being deeper, of having layers of meanings and connotations. I find myself listening to more and more classical music especially piano sonatas and other piano works. Not too long ago I came upon the work of the pianist Alice Sara Ott and in particular a new releaser entitled John Fields: Complete Nocturnes. As a novice when it came to classical music I was not familiar with either John Fields or the musical forms of Nocturnes. Apparently a nocturne in music is: a short composition of a romantic or dreamy character suggestive of night, typically for piano.
Wow, wouldn’t that be a great title for a series of dreamy night scenes! So begins another series of images. Nocturne #1 above hopefully captures what I am after. This may take me a few years!
Force Of Seeing 
The explicit borrowing of “Nocturnes” from the piano tradition—specifically naming John Field’s complete set via Alice Sara Ott—gives the photographic series a stronger conceptual anchor than mere atmospheric coincidence. It’s not just “night pictures”; it’s an attempt to translate the dreamy, introspective character of those short romantic piano pieces into visual terms, letting artificial light colours stand in for the harmonic subtlety and quiet drama that Field and later Chopin built into the form. The personal grief threading through the post makes the shift to nocturnal work feel earned rather than stylistic affectation; turning away from washed-out daylight toward richer, truer tones at night mirrors a kind of emotional re-tuning.
The choice to foreground that musical inspiration openly is refreshing in a photography context, where titles often lean vague or purely descriptive. It invites a cross-medium listening, so to speak—viewing these images while half-hearing the slow, cantabile lines of a Field nocturne in the mind. Whether the series sustains that depth across multiple years remains to be seen, but starting from this place already sets it apart from generic night photography. Looking forward to seeing how Nocturne #1 evolves into the fuller set.
Hi Dr. Banerjee
Thank you so much for the thoughtful commentary on this post and on my preliminary thoughts for the prospective Nocturnes series. Your thoughts want me to listen to the music more deeply and seek out more knowledge on John Fields intentions for this musical form. Transforming the emotions that are elicited by the music into images will be a challenge I am looking forward to pursuing. I am hoping you stay tuned and follow the progress of the series. Your insightful comments will be welcomed.