ST PAUL St in conjunction with the Auckland Festival of Photography is exhibiting a series of photographs by Morten Andersen, where real life meets film noir and fiction becomes slightly more tangible than it should.

Born 1965 in Oslo, Norway, Andersen is one of the leading younger photographers in Norway. Educated at the International Centre of Photography, New York (Joan Liftin, Nan Goldin, Larry Clark), he has received several European grants for his work, which can be described as straightforward photography. While most of the European and American photographers prefer a very conceptual strategy, Morten Andersen is interested in humankind and its fate, his pleasures and fears shown by pictures taken on the street, captured in bars and nightclubs, in the underground and in hotels. Andersen documents the human struggle in pursuit of happiness.

The title of the exhibition is a slight alteration of the term “Day for Night”, which is used in the film industry when shooting night scenes during the day, using special filters. It is also the title of a film by French director François Truffaut known also as La Nuit Americaine.

The photographs taken from the series Days of Night are mostly black and white images, often very rough and grainy. Images of people caught in a very moment of joy, fear or despair, emptied streets, a stray dog are shown together with colour images of flowers. Similar to the work of Antoine d’ Agata, which was on show at ST PAUL St in January 2006, Morten Andersen’s work explores the human condition from an existentialistic angle.