Purest Form: Darkness

What do you see when the day is over, the light becomes electric and there’s no one around? Lucas Zimmerman works with this kind of reduction as a way of shifting the focus towards light as well as darkness. It is the dialogue between light and shadow, the known and the unknown, that he sees, what inspires him and fuels his work. “I try to explore light as a photographic element, by focusing on its purest form: darkness.”

One of his most spectacular works is definitely the Traffic Lights series, for which he has spent two long years trying to seize ordinary traffic lights with a surreal and spectral twist. The series was captured late at night on a foggy, vacant intersection in Weimar, Germany. Lucas created the pictures taking 5-20 second long exposures, in shades of electric blue, ruby red and black and white. As all the colours and lights melt together, the eye is drawn further and further into the photographs.

Amongst other fascinating series, Backstreet Beijing, taken in China, in the so called hutongs, where people live confined and isolated from each other, Solitude Palace, ironically dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the smartphone, Tent, about pollution in high mountaineering, and The Light of Longing, where the contrast between darkness and illumination resembles the discrepancy we feel when longing for something.

Born in 1994, in Germany, Lucas is definitely a talent to watch.

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