Since David Claerbout’s nightscapes are presented in complete darkness, viewers must move about in the room slowly and deliberately. The Nightscape Lightboxes show pictures taken at night of locations on the border between civilization and nature, for instance, when a street in the urban outskirts fades into the woods. The pictures are so dark that they initially escape legibility; it takes a while for us to identify a tree or a patch of meadow. If there were more lighting in the room, Claerbout’s pictures would look black. His nocturnal images strain the limits of photography while simultaneously drawing attention to the astonishing capabilities of our sense of sight. Viewers must wait if they want to see. As in most of Claerbout’s work, time is a significant factor. It takes minutes to adjust to the darkness and for the retina to dilate so that our visual receptors can translate the little light there is into signals. This process cannot be actively accelerated. Such an experience in patience is unusual; the uneventfulness draws even greater attention to our own perception of the images. While we wait for them to emerge, other senses take precedence. Our hearing, in particular, begins to probe the dark unknown spaces and sounds around us.