4 - 10 August 2025 Afterlight Christopher Allery
On a Saturday morning in January 2023, I spent forty minutes alone in the former Hirose Photo Studio, located in the Hokkaido Open-air Historical Village, Japan. Light poured in through the studio’s “single slant” glass wall, creating a space of beauty and calm for me to contemplate the nature of light, life, and my photography practice. As I left the studio, I took a self-portrait. In After Light I the studio door’s glass window served as a portal to engage with ideas surrounding photography: where its histories and futures collided in the single moment I inhabited.
My journey through the winter landscape, as well as my understanding of snow, is a relatively new experience. The winter works featured in the After Light series are borne from a sense of childlike wonder. I am deeply appreciative of my partner, who organises these elaborately choreographed trips to remote, snowbound locations across northern Japan. In many ways, this part of the series is a love letter to him, a true adventurer for whom no journey or destination is more enjoyable than embarking on the unknown.
Each piece in the show serves as a meditation, translating intuition into image, as digital expressions take on solid form as ink on paper. In After Light XXIII corellas create a storm of sudden flight in my aunt’s subtropical garden, a private space she has lovingly curated. As a devotee of her self-created paradise, she spends every summer here: from the cool of the early morning to the balmy end of each day. The reward for her efforts is a cold shower and a single cigarette savoured at dusk. My mother told me she needs no lights at night; she knows our family home so well she can move through it by memory. That thought has stayed with me. The darkness in my images holds a similar feeling, familiar yet mysterious, layered with warmth and quiet evocation.
Life - to me - feels like a film set. The more it unfolds, the clearer it becomes: structure is flexible, narrative is choice. Each work is a threshold, somewhere to pass through, or to pause. After Light XI is set at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, a place I first saw as a teenager in Rebel Without a Cause.
Naming it might mark me as a tourist, but it’s essential to the series. A single moment distilled: my relationship to a vast, restless city, and beyond that, an ever- shifting world, imagined and real at once.
