This site bears the fruit of nocturnal fieldwork carried out, since 2010, in cities like Bucharest, London, Moscow, New York, Milan, Sofia, and Tallinn. It offers brief ethnographic vignettes of less than 200 words, describing situations encountered and conversations held -- on streets and markets, bus and train stations, and in shops and hotels.
Portraits are based on one-off and unarranged encounters with people working at night. We speak with them for several minutes up to two hours. Their names are never recorded in order to protect their anonymity. Our main objective is to have a genuine conversation and learn about our collocutors' work and life conditions. Essential for this is careful and emphatic ‘listening’.
During these conversations we refrain from using any invasive audio-visual recording devices. After having parted with the collocutors, a voice recorder is used to recollect the conversation and describe the situation in the form of detailed audionotes. The audionotes are then turned into detailed written notes - the raw material from which the ethnographic vignettes are crafted.
No photographs are taken during these encounters, only when the interlocutors explicitely ask to be pictured. Because of this, most photographs on this site are generated through AI (DreamScape: https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/generate), using elements of the ethnographic vignette as the prompt. In such cases, what may seem a snapshot of an actual situation or a portray photo of a collocutor is in actual fact an AI computer-generated image.
We are aware of the pitfalls and objections against the use of text-to-image IA tools, but believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. These AI images visualise the situations described, but their artificiality helps to guarantee anonymity, as they lack the indexical quality of real images. Their use is an 'artifice' in yet another sense: their uncanny look conveys a sense of alienation and detachment, somehow enacting the gaze through which migrants and night shift workers are viewed. Clicking through from a manufactured image to a realistic vignette in the form of a story drawn from a conversation, the reader enters into the life world of that particular person, enabling identification and empathy.
Occassionaly we do use our own images of nocturnal situations, without collocutors being identifiable. Alternatively, we may use copy-right-free images sourced through platforms such as the Wikimedia Commons. Image sources are always provided in the metadata section underneath the vignettes, where relevant source data (for example on authorship, location, date and hour of the nocturnal fieldwork) are shared.
The ethnographic vignettes that come out at the end are written in a realist, jargon-free and minimalist style. The key purpose of this style of ethnographic writing is to offer experience-near ethnography that can be read on the go. Some personal details may be changed or aspects of their stories modified without changing the crux of what they share with us.