Hegel argued that historical understanding can only be found in hindsight in the sense that knowledge of the meaning and purpose of an era comes at the close of that epoch. Hegel’s metaphorical image of the Owl of Minerva at the end of his Preface to the Philosophy of Right with its polarities of light and darkness in relation to philosophy, which signifies the end of a culture, is appropriate here.

To paraphrase Hegel, it is a late photography that paints its grey on grey of a form of life that has grown old and cannot be rejuvenated , but only understood by the grey in grey of photography. Everything is already finished, it’s over, we come too late. This raises the question of the place of our own time in history and whether photography is essentially connected to the past.

Photography’s understanding is an interpretation of the world made at dusk or the deepening twilight — the coming of the night of industrial society. In this night-time the old is disappearing and the new is emerging: ie., it is also the starting point of the new day — the new narrative of the post-industrial form of life. Does the new form of life also mean a new photography?

Twilight is also the transition in the opposite direction, the moment of dawn, and so it is the moment of transition and transience. The gray of dusk and the gray of dawn implies both the minimal difference between the transitions and no colour. Dusk and dawn have minimal colour because there is not enough light.

So the project is a looking back on what has been, namely industrial modernity.