Nighttime has been associated with solitude, danger, mystery, and the unknown throughout human history. The night transforms our notion of the world from one of routine certainty to one of mysteri- ous unknowing. The night holds secrets--secrets that may engage our curiosity, shelter us, or frighten us. There are those who seek comfort in the night and those who recoil from it. Brave was the ancestor who stepped outside of the light of the fire circle, for he might never return. The motif of night was established in Western art long before the advent of photography. Artists as far back as the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch played off the instinctive fear of darkness and the night in his masterpiece from 1503, The Garden of Earthly Delights. The 16th-century German printmaker Albrecht Dürer and Dutch painter and printer Lucas van Leyden repeatedly invoked night scenes in their work. Aert van der Neer was a 17th-century Dutch painter whose main body of work consisted of moonlit landscapes of his native Netherlands. Rembrandt famously relied on dark tones and deep shadows to evoke powerful emotions in his work, and several of van Gogh's most famous paintings are night scenes. Captivated by the night, van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother that, "I often think that the night is much more alive and more richly coloured than the day." 1 James McNeill Whistler painted a series of night and twilight scenes entitled Nocturnes, and of course Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, which conveys a night photography sense of urban isolation and loneliness, is one of the most rec- ognizable paintings of the 20th century. It seems only fitting that photographers should be drawn to the night as well for inspiration. Although painters put down on canvas whatever they see in their mind's eye, the photographer's camera records only what passes before the lens. In the case of the night photographer, the time that passes during the exposure is as important as the light. 4