Khan-Hoang Nguyen

With this portfolio, my main objective is to explore the relationships between light and dark. As children, we grew up terrified of the dark, and for me as a child, I always had a little night light in the corner of my bedroom. And for me, this light repelled all the scary monsters that I thought would sneak up on me at night. Light feels like a safe haven from the evil that is darkness. However, as people age, this fear slowly goes away and darkness slowly gets more thrilling as everyone grows into an older phase in their life full of long nights of work and late-night drives down the highway. 

To keep with the theme of light and dark, looking back, I was completely lost when it came to beginning this night photography portfolio. I had no experience or knowledge of night photography, which forced me to dedicate many nights shooting hundreds of test photos to gain a basic understanding on light behavior in limited light environments. After a point, I began to understand the basics, and my primary objective creating this portfolio became exploring and showcasing how light sources interacted with their dark environment in an artistic and beautiful manner.

The intimate dance that light and dark conducts in this universe is something truly mesmerizing, but oddly enough, a dance ignored by many. One of the first photographs I took when I really understood this dance was a photo of a car under a car port located on a house numbered “4910”. I was mesmerized to see how the carport light showered the car and the house in a golden artificial light. And as the light shoots away from the source it dissipates while simultaneously showering the house less and less as the distance from the source grows. Although the light becomes increasingly weaker as it travels away from the light source the small dances the light does all throughout the front lawn grass encapsulates my objective in these photos. I want to display these unique dances light and dark can have through the photos within this portfolio. Keeping this in mind, I’ve decided to name this portfolio “Dances in the Dark”, to truly put in words my belief on the true relationship between light and dark in this world.