The past few years have seen increased numbers of photographers working in the night landscape, using extended time exposure with combinations of strobe and ambient light. Darkness offers the possibility for greater control through the manipulation of light and provides an intense color saturation that can be employed for romantic or surreal effect.

Steve Fitch has been photographing nocturnal imagery since the early ’70s, initially concentrating on roadside signs in his black-and-white images for Diesels and Dinosaurs. Now, in his Western landscape pictures, Fitch uses color. He transposes

Gail Skoff has always appeared somewhat out of sync, a contemporary photographer with a 19th-century attitude. Skoff has photographed both the romantic and the exotic, from public parks and cafés in Paris to cremation ceremonies in Bali. She handcolors these pictures, making them seem even more temporally disjunctive.

Nevertheless, she has superseded what could be construed as anachronistic pictorialism and the fad of hand-tinting through a convincing fusion of content and technique. Skoff photographs with the balanced and inquisitive perspective of the 19th-century documentarian while her

Greg Macgregor photographs the synthetic structures and evidential markings left by man in the Western landscape. A large, broken down metal skeleton in the middle of an open plain looks like the decayed carcass of some paleolithic animal; a long metal building once perched on a cliff, now plunges, discarded and upended, into a water-filled gorge. However, not all of MacGregor’s pictures focus on discarded objects. He depicts strange phallic rock formations that seem extraterrestrial, and, in a handful of images, fabricates stars and constellations floating in dark voids. The majority of the

Peter Richards constructed a 30-foot diameter, flat, wooden circle for Time x Candlelight, and installed 276 evenly spaced small candles on it. The circle filled the space and the audience sat outside of the circle in a ring of chairs. A wooden circle, four hanging buckets, and two suspended cones dramatically heightened audience anticipation. When the lights gradually went out and the piece began, Richards moved to the center of the circle, put a hanging cone in motion and lit a single candle. His efforts to coordinate the marking of time had begun.

Richards’ science background influenced the