EDGE OF NIGHT/CUSP OF DAY

By MICHAEL PERKINS

OF THE VARIOUS DEFINITIONS OF THE WORD “TWILIGHT” found in most references, one is generally factual in a kind of scientific sense, i.e.,

the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, caused by the refraction and scattering of the sun’s rays from the atmosphere.

….which is nice if you’re a meteorologist, I guess. But a second interpretation of the word is more poetic, and, for my money, a little more on the philosophic side, as in

a period or state of obscurity, ambiguity, or gradual decline.

…or, to break it down more personally, I am sad to behold the first kind of twilight because I tend to typify the second type.

Photographically, I am always drawn to the strange inter-stages of life, in which things exist in more than one plane of existence at once.

For example, in the frame shown here, which I took just as a normal summer dusk was about to be swallowed up in a sudden surge of storm clouds, things are rather stuck in neutral. There is some bright light to be had, but it’s suggested more than stated. In like “midphase” fashion, the thunderheads that rolling in are not absolute black, just an overripe version of daylight colors. Everything is coming, and going, about to happen, and absolutely over with, all in the same moment. As this all came together, I wasn’t sure I could snag any usable image at all, but in instances like these, with everything mutating every second, you have to try, if for no other reason than to immortalize the weird convergence of forces.

Or, to use this collision of edge of night/cusp of day to refer back to the contrasting definitions of twilight we started with: I saw something ending in the day, and likewise felt something ebbing away in myself, and that’s why I took the picture.