At night, cities reveal what daylight smoothes over. In Nightcrawler, Erik Hadife’s (Instagram) first solo photography exhibition, those moments are caught instinctively, fragments of urban life illuminated briefly before disappearing again. Shot almost entirely on the streets of New York and presented for the first time in Beirut, the exhibition is currently on view at Union Marks in Bourj Hammoud until January 11.
Hadife photographs without staging or interruption. His images linger on fleeting encounters, figures paused beneath street lamps, faces momentarily exposed by storefront glow, silhouettes cut by passing headlights. Artificial light becomes an accidental spotlight, turning everyday scenes into unintentional stages suspended somewhere between intimacy and intrusion. The work sits in a space where observation meets emotion, revealing how cities subtly dictate how we move, connect, and remain distant from one another.
“There’s no grand concept behind it,” Hadife says. “I photograph from instinct. I’m drawn to the strange space where humans and cities collide, when ordinary life suddenly feels illuminated or revealing.”
New York acts as both subject and accomplice. A city defined by perpetual motion and constant light, it offers the perfect terrain for images that explore distance, presence, and anonymity. The photographs capture what often goes unnoticed: brief exchanges, quiet pauses, and accidental compositions formed not by intention, but by the city itself.
That sense of immersion extends to how Nightcrawler is shown. Rejecting the traditional white-cube format, the exhibition unfolds inside a working bar at Union Marks, which remains open throughout the show. The photographs exist alongside music, conversation, movement, and nightlife, not protected by silence or separation. It mirrors the conditions under which the images were made: embedded in life rather than removed from it.
The exhibition features a curated selection of night-time photographs taken in New York City, accompanied by selected quotes from writers and thinkers, each carefully credited and hand-lettered by Alix Hakim, as well as a soundtrack curated by Hadife himself, extending the atmosphere beyond the walls.
With Nightcrawler, Erik Hadife positions himself as an emerging photographic voice driven less by spectacle than by instinct, attentive to the uneasy beauty of cities after dark, and to the fleeting moments that define how we inhabit them.
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