The dead of night

I stumbled onto this scene one evening and found the aesthetics irresistible. The image of Watson Library is no doubt familiar, but I wanted the focus here to be on the eerie quality of the atmosphere. It’s astounding to me that no more than six hours before this shot was taken, this scene was packed with pedestrians.

Photo by Ryan Waggoner

I stumbled onto this scene one evening and found the aesthetics irresistible. The image of Watson Library is no doubt familiar, but I wanted the focus here to be on the eerie quality of the atmosphere. It’s astounding to me that no more than six hours before this shot was taken, this scene was packed with pedestrians.

By Ryan Waggoner

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Photo Gallery

The dead of night

Campus transformed.

The majority of the time I spend on campus is after the sun goes down. Many nights I find myself walking around campus at 1 or 2 a.m., and I’ve started to notice the transformation the area goes through every day. I discovered that there are two very different sides to campus. There’s the side that everyone knows — the crowded sidewalks, lines of idling buses and the chatter of a thousand conversations happening at once. And then there’s a whole other world with a completely different feeling — the world of campus at night. All the physical components are the same, but the atmosphere couldn’t be more different. Without the thousands of people who inhabit campus daily, there’s a sense of abandonment.

 This essay documents what I find most fascinating about campus after dark — the deserted feeling that falls on these oh-so-familiar spaces every night. I’ve become captivated by the contrast between how these areas function during the bustling hours of the day compared with the quiet stillness of the night. The staircases, walkways and huge buildings are still there, ready to accommodate thralls of students, but the absence thereof makes campus seem large and hollow. There’s something hauntingly beautiful about this emptiness that I’ve tried to convey in these images.

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