City streets bustling with light. A glamorous stranger passing by, a boy cycling in a daydream, an early morning brightened by the light of a surreal night. In ‘Light of Day,’ it’s impossible to determine what hour of the day you’re living in. Trees catch delicate moonlight, while simultaneously a midday sun draws harsh shadows over blind walls. Initially, you experience the stillness of a lazy summer evening; a second later, you are transported into a bright new day. And in a blink of an eye, everything changes again.
Photographer Jaap Vliegenthart experiments, as he often does in his work, with the visual frameworks of our mind:
“Most of the time, a photo tries to capture a moment in time, and I’m always looking for a story or a particular idea. For a photographer, everything feels staged, even when you are shooting real life. You’re searching for those angles that reveal more than what initially meets the eye. I wanted to capture more coincidences and to challenge the preconceived paths of my mind. Therefore, I chose to photograph one place for 24 hours and see how only natural light could shift my point of view. It became a study of light without ever giving up its true secret.”
‘Light Of Day’ is an ongoing project of Jaap Vliegenhart. While previously shooting in his hometown of Amsterdam, he decided to take the project across the pond to the legendary light of Los Angeles. The city has been a huge source of inspiration since the very beginning of his career.
Los Angeles is seductive, alluring, glamorous, and mischievous. It is a city without a center, a city with a rich and illustrious past that is imprinted in our collective memory. Often, one’s perspective of this area is filled with nostalgia formed by the exaggerated images that Hollywood has portrayed, not only to the world but also to its own citizens. This elusive trait of the city lends itself perfectly for this specific project and the documentation of this concrete jungle.
Capturing all these small moments over the time span of a single day results in a magical realism that reveals itself—a conjunction of moments, brought to life with the infamous Los Angeles light, in which new layers can be discovered again and again.
