Building Shadows: Rethinking Darkness in the Urban Night

In 2013, I attempted to depict darkness without the aid of artificial light in the Galloway Forest Park in Scotland. In 2009, the International Dark-Sky Association officially designated the park as the first Dark Sky Park – an area protected from light pollution – in the UK, and only the fourth in the world.¹Forestry and Land Scotland, “Galloway International Dark Sky Park,” Forestry and Land Scotland (2021), https://forestryandland.gov.scot/visit/forest-parks/galloway-forest-park/dark-skies. Within its deep, dark setting, I was determined to try and fix the “natural” phenomenon and atmosphere of darkness onto a negative with my camera. After several midnight attempts at producing very long exposures, I learned that my perception of the tonalities of darkness differed entirely from that of a camera. The result was far from extraordinary—the negatives remained mostly bare, containing hardly any traces of light. It was not until much later that I realized that the blank negatives were exactly what I was looking for. That is, the resulting images were not the “nothing” of a completely white or black surface (i.e., a blank negative that blackened or faded) but a representation of the limits of capturing darkness in a visual form.²Chantal Meng, Light at Night: What is the Matter with Darkness? (PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2024), 89–90. [Fig. 1]

This experience led me to explore how photography shapes our perception of artificial lighting, particularly how visual elements influence the presence or absence of darkness. Darkness is not simply the Earth’s shadow; artificial light and its interplay with shadows shape how we design and experience the urban night. Urban darkness is not merely the absence of light; light itself creates shadows. This essay connects visual history — particularly photography — to artificial lighting design, revealing how visual imagery shapes urban nightscapes. By rethinking shade as both a cultural and ecological issue, it proposes new approaches to urban light pollution, spatial experience, and our evolving perception of darkness.

The following argument applies a visual thinking framework to urban lighting, arguing that illuminated spaces require critical analysis of their visual characteristics. The introduction of electric lighting reshaped the “image” of the night, fascinating modernist thinkers and influencing movements like Photo Nocturne, with figures such as Berenice Abbott, Brassaï, born Gyula Halász, and Alfred Stieglitz. Artistic representation played a crucial role in teaching the public how to experience this “visible darkness.” As William Sharpe notes, since the mid-nineteenth century, nocturnal art has guided our perception of the night while reshaping our relationship with darkness.³William Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8–9.

Artificial Light and Its Shadows

Our perceptions of darkness at night and the creation of shadows through artificial light require a critical examination — not only of visual representation practices but also of the history and techniques through which cameras have translated this visible world. Reflecting on my blank negatives from Galloway Forest Park in Scotland, the photographic translation of light, shadow, and darkness becomes essential to understanding how these elements influence both the visual (e.g., the image) and the visible (e.g., the built space). Beyond cultural representations, we must also consider the role of technology itself. What does the camera capture? What does electric light illuminate? And what do they leave behind together in the dark?

Photography is more than a recording tool — it shapes how we experience and design our environment. Scholars like William Sharpe and Beatriz Colomina show how modern architectural photography, in magazines and art, influences our perception of built spaces. Since its origins, when it was called “nature’s pencil,”⁵Talbot, William Henry Fox, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman,1844). photography has defined how we visualize light and shadow, offering its own interpretation of darkness through its technological lens.

When we think of shadows, we often imagine an imprint created by light. In visual and architectural design, shadows are either emphasized to enhance aesthetics or downplayed as a secondary effect. For example, stage designs in theatre use spotlights to create artificial darkness,⁶Noam Milgrom Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). while modern architecture, with its fully glazed buildings, often avoids shadows altogether.⁷Aksel Karcher (ed.), Light Perspectives: Between Culture and Technology; Light, Space, Perspectives, 1st ed. (Lüdenscheid: ERCO, 2009). This preference for light reduces shadows to either aesthetic tools or visual disruptions. Yet, shadows are integral to the built environment — not just symbolically but as fleeting, unpredictable elements that shape images and influence how artificial light makes darkness visible in urban nightscapes.

The Shadow as Image

An ancient legend describes how an image, formed through the interplay of light and shadow, takes on spatial dimensions. Pliny the Elder recounts the tale of a Corinthian maid who traces the shadow of her departing lover onto a wall, marking what is often considered the origin of image-making. Her father, a potter, later carves the outline into clay, transforming the shadow into sculpture.⁸Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 118; and Victor Stoichiță, The Pictorial Turn (New York: Routledge, 1999), 7–8. This tale speaks to humanity’s impulse to capture memories and shape environments, linking shadows to both representation and material form.

In the Western tradition, shadows have long been seen as symbolic rather than as entities in themselves, a theme explored in Baxandall’s Shadows and Enlightenment (1995). Shadows in fine art, forensic literature, and film—from Caravaggio’s paintings to Hitchcock’s thrillers—often serve as stand-ins for absence, adding layers of meaning to visual storytelling.⁹Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, The Visual World of Shadows (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 11.

Despite this rich history, nighttime shadows remain understudied, except in the context of crime.¹⁰A difficult and heated debate with many different points of view when it comes to night lighting. See, for example: Aaron Chalfin, Benjamin Hansen, Jason Lerner, Lucie Parker, ”‘Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment of Street Lighting in New York City”, Journal of Quantitative Criminology 38 (1) (2022): 127–57, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6; UChicago Urban Labs, “Can Street Lighting Reduce Crime?” (n.d.), https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/crime-lights-study [last accessed May 11th 2020); David Kortava, “The Controversial Floodlights Illuminating New York City’s Public-Housing Developments,” The New Yorker (June 30, 2021), https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/the-controversial-floodlights-illuminating-new-york-citys-public-housing-developments [last accessed April 10th 2025]; ‘The Controversial Floodlights Illuminating New York City’s Public-Housing Developments’ (Kortava 2021); Amanda Petrusich, “Fear of the Light: Why We Need Darkness,” The Guardian, (August 23 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/why-we-need-darkness-light-pollution-stars [last accessed April 10th 2025]; or Mike Riggs, “Street Lights and Crime: A Seemingly Endless Debate,” Bloomberg.Com, (February 12, 2014), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-12/street-lights-and-crime-a-seemingly-endless-debate‘ [last accessed April 10th 2025]. In contrast, urban daylight studies focus on overshadowing by buildings¹¹Andrew Francis, “Right of Lights Ahead!” Journal of Building Appraisal 4 (1), (2008): 5–13, https://doi.org/10.1057/jba.2008.18. or the ecological need for shade in public spaces amid global warmings.¹²Sam Bloch, “Shade”, Places Journal (April 2019), https://doi.org/10.22269/190423. While a “right to light”¹³In UK law, the “right to light” is a legal principle and design consideration; see “Rights to Light,” n.d. GOV.UK, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rights-to-light [last accessed April 15th 2025]. is widely acknowledged, little consideration has been given to a “right to darkness.”¹⁴Scholars are calling for more “light justice” frameworks; see Joanne Entwistle and Don Slater,  “Making Space for ‘the Social’: Connecting Sociology and Professional Practices in Urban Lighting Design,” The British Journal of Sociology (March 2019), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12657. Most research on artificial lighting addresses safety, light pollution, and the loss of darkness, but few studies examine how lighting actively shapes darkness itself. From Plato’s allegories to modern visual art, shadows have fascinated thinkers for centuries. By linking image-making to spatial design, my analysis highlights how visual and spatial perception intersect — revealing the need to reconsider shadows to fully understand darkness in urban environments.

Photographing Darkness

In 1944, Harold Eugene Edgerton pushed this visual conquest further with Stonehenge at Night, taken using a 50,000-watt flash from an aircraft.¹⁷Harold E. Edgerton, Harold Edgerton: Seeing the Unseen, ed. Ron Kurtz, Deborah G. Douglas, & Gus Kayafas, (Göttingen: Steidl., 2018), 165. The stark interplay of light and shadow dramatized the monument, reinforcing photography’s ability to stage and redefine spaces — while also creating the uncanny impression of a reduced-scale Stonehenge, like a miniature, as seen from above. His collaboration with the UK Army Air Force underscored the ideological link between technological control and visual mastery of the environment.

Photography’s relationship with darkness remains paradoxical. While it documents and reveals, it also frames darkness as something to be overcome and visually fixed. This approach aligns with an ideology that equates darkness with failure, inefficiency, or even ignorance.¹⁸Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth”, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Kleinberg-Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 37. From early cave images to modern digital photography, technological advancements have not only captured darkness but also shaped perceptions of it. Even today, smartphone cameras outshine shadows, erasing darkness rather than representing it. These limitations reveal photography’s ongoing struggle to depict the complexities of light and shadow, shaping how we see and interpret the world.

The Subtle Shadows of Darkness

In urban environments, shadows result less from the Earth’s rotation than from artificial illumination. Light pollution ensures the night sky is rarely truly dark, while harsh artificial lighting creates stark contrasts. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier observes, “[t]hese lights cast nothing but darkness made visible.… From a distance, they hurt the eyes; up close, they provide hardly any light, and standing directly underneath one, it feels as if one might as well be in the dark.”²¹Louis-Sébastien Mercier cited by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 95. Similarly, photography and city lighting share a tendency to flatten darkness — early photographic techniques often reduced shadows to featureless black areas, just as harsh artificial lighting diminishes their depth and complexity in urban landscapes. The result is an environment where darkness appears as a uniform, depthless space rather than a nuanced, dynamic element.

Sculptor Constantin Brâncuși’s photograph of The Beginning of the World challenges this perception. The dark form beneath the egg blurs the boundary between shadow and reflection, reinforcing how light and darkness work together to define space and form. Here, shadow is not an absence but an essential compositional force, shaping how we perceive volume.²²Victor Ieronim Stoichiță, A Short History of the Shadow. Essays in Art and Culture, (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 208–9.

Mikael Pettersson, in Depictive Traces: On the Phenomenology of Photography (2011), notes that while photography is widely analysed, its phenomenological properties remain underexplored. He argues that photographs create an illusion of presence, yet our bias toward familiar cast shadows over diffuse atmospheric ones distorts spatial imagination.²³Mikael Petterson, “Depictive Traces: On the Phenomenology of Photography”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 2 (2011): 193, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2011.01460.x. This recalls Plato’s allegory of the cave, where he emphasizes the need to turn away from shadows to attain true knowledge. Plato viewed the cave as an artificial world, where shadows cast by objects created an illusion of reality.²⁴Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth”, 37. However, he showed little interest in sense perception itself. In fact, the similarity between the cave wall and a theatre stage hindered him from recognizing that observation and sensory experience within the cave could also lead to knowledge.²⁵See also: Edvin Ostergaard, “Echoes and Shadows: A Phenomenological Reconsideration of Plato’s Cave Allegory,” Phenomenology & Practice 13, no. 1 (2019): 20–33, https://doi.org/10.29173/pandpr29372.

Rather than treating shadows as mere byproducts of light, we should consider them integral to spatial experience. Baxandall notes that Enlightenment thought shaped visual representations of shadow, prioritizing analytical over experiential understanding.²⁶Michael Baxandall,. Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 35-36. Today, the same logic applies to urban lighting—artificial illumination often prioritizes spectacle over function, flooding cities with postcard-like imagery rather than preserving the nuances of nighttime space.²⁷See also:  Entwistle and Slater, “Making Space for ‘the Social’: Connecting Sociology and Professional Practices in Urban Lighting Design”. To rethink our relationship with urban darkness, we must critically engage with artificial lighting and reconsider shadow not as an absence, but as an active design element shaping perception and experience.

Sketching Darkness

Night Drawing is a participatory artistic methodology I created to foster a deeper engagement with urban darkness. Through collective drawing sessions after dusk, participants explore the interplay of light and shadow, challenging conventional perceptions of nighttime illumination. This embodied practice highlights the role of shade and darkness in shaping spatial perception and atmosphere, offering both an artistic exploration and a critical research tool. By emphasizing sensory awareness, Night Drawing encourages a more mindful and sustainable approach to urban lighting design.²⁸Chantal Meng, “Night Drawing: Re-writing Darkness in the Nocturnal Land/Cityscape,” Ethnologies 44, no. 1 (2022): 153, https://doi.org/10.7202/1096061ar.

In an era dominated by machine learning and AI, it is crucial to critically assess how visual information is shaped—particularly in relation to shading and modeling techniques. Baxandall notes that shadows are often overlooked as “phenomenal things,” arguing for a concept of “specifically inattentive perception” to complement focused observation.²⁹Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment, 120, 145. This gap in perception impacts not only visual culture but also urban planning and climate-responsive design, as Sam Bloch highlights.³⁰Bloch, “Shade,” 2019.

Our understanding of darkness is shaped by visual translations—photographs, pictorial representations, and cultural expressions that influence how illuminated spaces are designed. The images analyzed in this paper, from my own photographs to Pliny’s tale, early cave photography [Fig. 2], and Brâncuși’s sculpture, all reveal the tension between visual representation and spatial experience. Photography has profoundly influenced how we perceive both light and darkness, reinforcing specific narratives about urban nocturnal spaces. The sensory and phenomenological properties of artificial illumination go beyond aesthetics, actively shaping social relations and urban experience—emphasizing that light is never neutral.³¹See also: Gernot Böhme,  Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2017), and Entwistle and Slater,  “Making Space for ‘the Social’: Connecting Sociology and Professional Practices in Urban Lighting Design,” 2019.

This article underscores the urgent need for new approaches to the representation of shadows. Shadows are not merely visual by-products, but cultural, ecological, and spatial phenomena that shape our relationship with light and darkness. Beyond their pictorial role and symbolic resonance, shadows must be reconsidered through their phenomenological meaning and spatial qualities.

By revisiting the historical and visual significance of shadow — particularly the visual history of shadow concepts in the West—we can challenge entrenched perceptions and rethink shadow as essential to a more equitable and sustainable urban future. This rethinking is crucial not only for designing ecologically resilient spaces, but also for ensuring equitable and social access — not just to light, but to shade, and thus, to darkness.

Chantal Meng

Chantal Meng is a researcher, visiting assistant professor at Pratt, and artist working with photography, drawing, and performance. Her work explores how light pollution shapes our perception of darkness, with a focus on the design and politics of urban nighttime environments. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has received a Fulbright, the Stuart Hall PhD Fellowship, and a Doc.Mobility grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Chantal co-founded the design studio POL and the art space Grand Palais in Bern, and founded Night Drawing, a participatory project exploring light and darkness in the city at night.