Kristine Richer: Luminous Night

"My photographic method explores elements of connection. Life is often too fast and too busy, leaving a sense of detachment; My work invites viewers to slow down and reconnect with nature and our place in the universe.

I create nightscape photographs that act as a union between the celestial and terrestrial. My ongoing body of work “Luminous Night” uses specialized long exposure techniques to capture the extraordinary spectacle that our natural eye cannot perceive.

As humanity progresses we continue to lose our relationship with the night sky. The pieces in this series act as an ingress to ancestral knowledge and commentary of the modern collective condition. With analytical eyes, I dissect layers of our daily lives. It is very hard to totally remove oneself from the favorable environments we have fabricated: a sense of safety, warmth and comfort.

At night, away from the ‘whisper’ of the city glow, I find myself humbled. The dark is no longer in obscurity and there is light in that darkness. This sweeping light reveals a connection to something outside our domesticity, something big, something remarkable, something unknown. I become an explorer, mapping the vast splendor of the cosmos. The relationship between the earthly terrain and nightscape creates a narrative of our natural home in the boundless universe."

Richer is a classically trained photographer working in Nova Scotia, Canada. She completed two undergraduate degrees at NSCAD University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a Major in Photography and Bachelor of Design with a Major in Interdisciplinary Design. 

Her images have been published thousands of times and shown all over the world. Notably she has had billboard size images hung at the Javits Centre during New York Toy Fair and in Nuremburg, Germany for Spielwarenmesse.

 Kristine made the leap in 2020 to become a full time artist and educator. She taught photography at NSCAD university from 2008-2016, and now under Kristine Rose Photography has taught thousands of students how to create stunning images of the Milky Way.

Her nightscape images have been exhibited locally and worldwide and have been awarded the coveted NASA Astronomy Photo of the Day (APOD) twice.