Neon Lights by Night by Anthony Presley

Having been passionate about Japan and its culture from a young age, Anthony Presley visited Japan for the first time in 2018, for professional reasons. At the end of his working day, he would wander through the Kanto region and take photos of the streets plunged into darkness. This is how his series Dream World came to be. ‘It’s an experience that took 20 years to come together. When I returned to the USA, I already knew that this series had to describe and visualise what I felt during that fantastical experience’, explains Anthony Presley in an interview with Pen. ‘The title has two meanings: it’s the realisation of one of my biggest dreams, and a visual representation of the mind.’ 

In this series, the photographer, a graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, wandered through cities in Japan to capture their main, bustling streets lit by neon lights, but also their winding streets, some of which were empty, and others of which had a few night-time wanderers. He also featured the front windows of izakaya and various boutiques. This contrasts with the other work by this artist based in Memphis, Tennessee, because Dream World involved a significant amount of work during the photo editing stage, with particularly close attention paid to colours and contrasts.  

A series based on shades

‘It’s been proven that colours affect our emotional state and that our body reacts differently to shades. When developing a photo, I keep this in mind as I work with the information contained in the raw file’, explains Anthony Presley, who is in fact colourblind, which prevents him from distinguishing between certain shades of red and green. ‘For Dream World, I worked on the colours to convey the emotions I felt at the precise moment when I took the photo, and how I felt in general.’

The artist’s trip to Japan also inspired another photographic series, Japan fragments of the afternoon, composed exclusively of photographs taken in the afternoon. It features not only another time of day but also another technique, as all of the images in this series were edited in black and white.

Dream World (2018), a photographic series by Anthony Presley, can be viewed on his website.