Ben Cauchi’s photographs seem to arrive from another time and place, yet are thoroughly of the present. His use of the mid-19th-century wet collodion photographic process to explore the modern world gives insights into both that world and the photographic method. The Evening Hours brings together new writing on Cauchi’s subtractive practice—dwelling on absence, lulls, the uncertain, the opaque, and the fleeting elements of life—with reproductions of more than 80 of his own photographs. The artist has played an active role in this process, returning to his own archive just as he trawls through photographic histories to select, present, and sequence a decade of work. Cauchi’s shadowy images fixed on metal and glass explore the psychological dimensions of viewing and the nature of photography itself by continually moving within and expanding the gray areas between truth and untruth, presence and absence, the empirical and the incorporeal, seeing and believing.

Ben Cauchi is an award-winning photographer whose work has been exhibited in every major public collection in New Zealand as well as in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Australia. He has been awarded a Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award, and a Creative New Zealand Berlin Visual Artists Residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.