November Light by Kip Harris

Kip Harris went to northern Italy in 1999 thinking that he would photograph the comings and goings of people at the main railroad station in Milan. What he photographed instead was November light. This is not the warm amber of Rome nor the brilliant whiteness of the far north but rather a cutting, biting blue-grey that casts magical shadows. This light takes over and moves people and things out of its way..

“At this time, I was using two Mamiya 6 film cameras. One for black and white; one for color. I found after scanning the film that I was really seeing everything in black and white and that color was not adding to the images. I liked the way the grain of the film worked with the character of the light and the way it defined space as a positive presence and striped everything down to the bare essentials.

These images have been scanned and then processed in Lightroom for cropping, Silver eFex Pro for contrast, and Photoshop to clean up some of the dust specks.”

Kip Harris

Harris grew up in a small farming community in the Intermountain West of the US. He holds degrees in English literature from Dartmouth College, in humanities from the University of Chicago, and architecture from the University of Utah. He was a principal of FFKR Architects in Salt Lake City for nearly 30 years.