Notes from the Dark Season

The sun sets in Longyearbyen in late October and doesn’t rise again until mid-February. What surprises visitors isn’t the dark; it’s the schedule the town keeps inside it — school runs by headlamp, café hours unchanged, a stubbornness about ordinary life that reads, after a week, as a kind of genius.

The dark isn’t uniform either. There’s the blue noon twilight of November, the true black of December where the aurora becomes street lighting, and the strange hope of January when the horizon starts rehearsing color again.

I went to photograph the absence of light and came home with pictures of what people do instead of having any.