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Matinee: 'Night Bloom 2019'
12 December 2020
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 374th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Night Bloom 2019.
Night Bloom is an annual holiday event at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. While the Park is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, Night Bloom would have been celebrating its third were it not for the pandemic.
For the event, the Conservatory puts on a light show that encourages its exotic plants to bloom in the darkness of midnight sunsets.
Thanks to David Hill, you don't have to imagine it. He captured the 2019 show and recently released this 2:12 video of highlights accompanied by Vivaldi's Autumn from The Four Seasons.
Hill cites the black-and-white images of Berenice Abbott and Pirkle Jones as influences. Abbott's focus on the collective creation of the urban environment by a variety of people and Jones's collaboration with Dorothea Lange in Death Valley inspire him to preserve the Bay area's quintessential stories.
He writes:
To communicate my own thoughts and thus to provoke or inspire, I try to bring to life images that are otherwise invisible to the multitudes of unseeing eyes that go thumping, thudding or stomping, through corners, alleys and streets. I love documenting emotions and activity and life and I find that in the Bay Area life can be wonderfully diverse, rich or miserable, glorious and sometimes desolate. Hence, I hope to capture these moments all with my camera, to give them visibility and expression and thus to help sharpen the artistic minds of viewers. Finding the culture and humanity in everyday things like deserts and skies, movement and activity, faces and emotions and road trips gives life and expression to my art.
In this piece he captures a little magic that may be missing in Golden Gate Park this year but still seems to be, well, in the air.