Entre chien et loup is a multi-layered French expression I’ve been obsessed with for years. It’s used to describe a specific time of day, just before night, when the light is so dim you can’t distinguish a dog from a wolf.
This phrase isn’t all about levels of light. It expresses that limit between the familiar and the unknown, the domestic and wild. It’s an uncertain threshold between hope and fear. In some ways, it also encompasses the present moment — that precipice we live on between what’s just been and what is about to be.
At the turn of the New Year, the feeling of transition — along with the echoes of last year at our backs — puts us in a liminal space. The feeling of being on the edge of something but not sure quite what was made even hazier this time round by the general time fog of the pandemic.
By 2014, my photography had taken me to far flung and remote places. These were remarkable environments, located at the top of mountains, bereft of many distractions, allowing the mind to contemplate the quality of the light and how best to capture it. The stillness allowed me to appreciate the unique places that the light reaches first in the mornings, and finally leaves at dusk. I decided to find some of the most magical spots to capture this — remote glaciers throughout the South Island of New Zealand. Entre chien et loup — the hour of change is an ongoing project which I return to from time to time.
The white of the snow serves to intensify the colours visible, yet the location itself highlights how quick any change in the light can be. With every second and minute that passes, the light changes, colours intensify, shadows become deeper, the gradients dissolve.
The locations pictured are some of the most remote and impossible to visit, yet the most vulnerable to change. I would get helicoptered in during the afternoon and build a snow cave to sleep in overnight, capturing the sunset and sunrise in each location. Having the privilege to spend time in each of these locations highlighted the process of the initial idea into a wider metaphor for contemporary life.
What becomes interesting is trying to capture the exact point at which this change becomes the most apparent, pronounced and visible. Perhaps it is in the tension we see in the image, or the change in colour, or perhaps it’s the story behind the image.
We live in an era when the rate of change is becoming incrementally faster and faster — often accompanied by a wilful absence of consideration of environmental impact. That time-haze of the last couple of years has made all this change almost imperceptible.
This is the hour of change.