Afterlight Christopher Allery
4 - 10 August 2025
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 AFTERLIGHT 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 AFTERLIGHT 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 AFTERLIGHT 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. AFTERLIGHT 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.
- Christopher Allery 2025
AFTERLIGHT I
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
86 x 57.3 cm
$875
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
Archival pigment print on
cotton
x 57.3 cm $875 Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
308gsm
AFTERLIGHT VI
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
70.3 x 125 cm
$1200
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT VII
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
36 x 64 cm
$625
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT XI 2024
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
60 x 60 cm
$875
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT XII
2023
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
86 x 57.3 cm (FRAMED)
$1500
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT XIII
2025
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
57.3 x 86 cm
$875
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT XVII 2023
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
42 x 28 cm
$400
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT XVIII 2022
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm 60 x 40 cm
$625
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
42 x 28 cm
$400
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT XXII
2023
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
60 x 40 cm
$625
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
AFTERLIGHT XXIV
Archival pigment print on
60 x 40 cm
$625
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle cotton rag 308gsm
42 x 28 cm
$400
Edition of 5 + 1 A/P
