Twin Cities photogs talk about their night prowlings and the work it produced

When the night is young and the city goes to sleep, three photographers come out to play.

Setting up shots of eery, desolate-looking landscapes and sometimes empty scenery, well-known Twin Cities photographers Will Agar, Chris Faust and Glen Grafelman get to work on beautiful black and white photos capturing the haunting qualities of the night.

“Night Approaches,” the exhibit showcasing each of these artists, recently hit the James Wegner Art Gallery at Riverland Community College. The exhibit, shown last month, depicted differing styles of the night.

“I’ve always been engaged with the idea of night photography,” Agar said.

The show started after Agar, a photography instructor at North Hennepin Community College, decided to create an exhibit based on the night-time photos he had worked on for some time.

“I have these night pictures I’ve been doing for a number of years,” Agar said. “I realized I didn’t really have a place to show them unless I have a single show.”

Agar quickly realized he didn’t want to showcase all of his own work, as the time and costs associated with organizing, framing and negotiating with galleries would have been too high for his liking. That’s when he reached out out Grafelman, a fellow NHCC instructor, and Faust, a nationally acclaimed Minnesota photographer, who he knew did similar work.

“I was kind of lazy,” Agar joked. “I was kind of cheap, but I also wanted to ride on the success of Chris Faust and his book.”

Faust released “Nocturnes,” a collection of more than 70 tritone night photos, in 2007.

Agar tends to set up technically sound shots. The son of photographer Frank Agar, Will likes to capture classic-looking photos on black and white film. He has worked for more than 35 years at NHCC and is more comfortable talking about other peoples’ work than his own. He draws much of his inspiration from the classic, almost cinematic photos of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and at times plays around with abstraction in his photos, though he tends to be more formal and realistic, like Ansel Adams.

“I’ve always liked abstraction,” Agar said. “I’ve always gravitated towards that.”

Grafelman is another story. His images are often spliced together in a sort of mixed media, proto-Photoshopped way. He originally started as a painter and sculpter who ened up in New York City working at a photo studio, where he was inspired by all the photos he saw to try photography himself. Though the other photographers discouraged him from the practice, Grafelman persevered.

“At that piont, I used the studio to help educate myself,” he said. “To learn photography from that sort of inside angle was tremendous.”

Grafelman began his abstract images shortly therafter, taking photos of random aesthetically pleasing sites and combining them to form new, sometimes erotically-tinged pictures which explore sexuality in everyday sights. The process was a little more complex when he started in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as Grafelman would have to edit and develop rolls of film to create stills.

“I didn’t want to be a sort of traditional photographer’s photographer,” he said. “I wanted to come from a different kind of art angle. I wanted to build photographs. I wanted to build images.”

“Night Approaches” found its way to Riverland via Tim Jones, the James Wegner Art Gallery curator. Jones used to work with Agar and Grafelman and had wanted to showcase an exhibit by his coworkers for some time. Though the exhibit has disbanded now, each photographer was happy for the experience.

“I was extremely flattered to be in an exhibit with Will,” Grafelman said.