Restless Nights Inspire Artist's Spectral Photos

Restless Nights Inspire Artist's Spectral Photos

Artist Robert Knight's long-exposure photography visualizes people's nocturnal movements as they sleep, or don't, throughout the night. His photo project, Sleepless, consists of ghostly aggregations of subjects tossing and turning. The idea for the series came from his own bout of insomnia after he and his wife became parents.

"Before having kids, sleep was something that I more or less took for granted," says Knight. "Sometimes I slept less, sometimes more, but it generally averaged out that I got as much sleep as my body needed."

With young kids in the house, however, Knight found his sleep constantly disrupted, which was compounded by the rest of life's stresses. He would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep. At that point it occurred to him that documenting his insomnia and creating a visual representation of his movements in bed might make for an interesting art project. The subject matter quickly extended beyond his own restlessness.

He began experimenting in the bedrooms of friends and family with camera settings and guesswork. Knight later introduced Sleepless into the homes of strangers.

"Overcoming the technical issues took some persistence," explains Knight. "The camera shutter has to be opened by the subject before they go to sleep and then closed before the sun comes up, otherwise the picture is ruined."

Light meters don't work in the dim rooms Knight was photographing, so he had to crunch some numbers. Using the Inverse-square Law, which essentially says that the amount of light from a source falls off exponentially compared to distance, Knight was able to calculate the proper exposure based off nightlights or adjacent bathroom bulbs.

The topic and photographs have proven popular. Knight believes his work is relevant to insomniacs, young parents, the elderly, people with health issues and people with a lot of stress in their lives. "Come to think of it, that probably includes most people," he says.

Knight, a commercial and fine art photographer in upstate New York, was pleasantly surprised by the ghostly results of his first attempts. They tell a story that even video monitoring of a subject's sleep patterns can't capture.

"The appearance and color of the spaces completely transform," says Knight. "The figure itself becomes a layered apparition very much contradictory to our connotations of 'sleeping like a log,' 'getting a good night's rest' or 'deep sleep.'"

Knight views the photos as a comment on a contemporary obsession with sleep. Are we getting enough? Is it the right kind? Is a lack of it making us unhappy?

"I doubt this is something that people worried much about in the Victorian era," he says.

While the refinement of his process has erased most of the guesswork, Knight says he always finds something "magical and unexpected" in each photo. His own rest has returned to a more predictable pattern as well.

"I sleep much better now that my kids sleep through the night," he says.

All photos by Robert Knight.