German Photo Book Award 21/22 Shortlist

Night activity sounds at first like animals roaming through the night with their twinkling eyes in search of food. But just like animals, we humans also roam through the nights, whether involuntarily through sleepwalking, for example, or also through our job, where we have been assigned to the night shift. But night activity can also be interpreted differently. Thus, each of us has an internal clock, which also beats differently for each person. There are early risers and late risers, larks and owls, or morning and evening types. 

If the night is your day, you know that your inner clock does not run according to the times that are considered “normal” in society. I, too, feel the same way.

With my photo documentation, I wanted to investigate the nocturnal Stuttgart, and in doing so, I settled on certain locations, as well as parameters, that would be repeated over the entire period of the documentation. I mainly focused on the districts of Stuttgart Mitte and Stuttgart West and wanted to investigate and report on them. As a temporal framework I decided on a time between 22:00 clock to 02:00 clock in the morning, four hours of pure darkness, which were illuminated by the lights of the city.

Daniel Schmitt