“The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.” — Francis Bacon.

The photography of Tim Simmons prompts us to dream, to contemplate time and eternity. His works expound the spirit of the place, from the mundane to the magnificent. Landscapes from the back yard to the snowfield are the sets for his eerie and enigmatic photographs. Simmons is a master technician, an illusionist. He is meticulous in the orchestration of his modest, yet elaborate tableaux. Their poise, composition and lighting are immaculate. By using a technique refined over the last twenty-five years, he confirms that the camera can do much more than capture a moment in time. Intervention presents landscapes on an indeterminate, liminal plane between dream and reality and elevates them above history and legend. His pictures suggest the hidden, haunting beauty behind deceptively familiar locations: empty and lonely territories become poetic and seductive. Dissonantly lit, isolated, and yet immediately recognisable, the images reveal the transformation of the urban landscape after dark: usually banal and disregarded, grey concrete, faceless carports and anonymous stairways are estranged and take on altogether new meanings.

Simmons employs the form of the nocturne to reveal the world anew, instilled with a heavy silence and an anxious glow. He shows us the world as it appears during the diminishing hours of day and the depths of the night, when the uncanny and the otherworldly manifest themselves. The fleeting crepuscular moments he captures are rendered with concentration and subtlety and endure. They reveal the yet unrealised transformative potential in our everyday environment. They are still, silent and beautiful.

Validating the inexplicable is a concern that runs through the series. The images are shot at night or at twilight, the magical zone where the veil separating this world and the next is at its thinnest. The landscapes depicted bask in the diminishing light, something which accents the glow that persists, and which emanates from an unknown source. The works evoke notions of interlude and aftermath. Their atmosphere causes an exhilarating unease, a nervous excitement and a shift in perception: we feel either that the unknown is about to appear or that it has just left.

Simmons’ images combine the empiricism and objectivity of photography with our desire to believe in the ethereal and the otherworldly. In a visual culture saturated in images, photography trades on a claim to the underlying empirical truth of the subject depicted. Intervention in particular plays on our trust in the objectivity of photography, in our willingness to suspend disbelief and accept the image. Simmons recognises that despite our cynicism, all of us crave something beautiful and transcendent in our lives. Each photograph in the series offers a glimpse of a hidden mystery, uncovering and documenting a hitherto undiscovered environment and triggering in us an imaginative reverie. His photographs contribute to the mystery of life and confirm the elusiveness of a tangible truth.