For all its amenities, urban life lacks several aspects of nature that we don’t often consider while we’re caught in the daily rigamarole. The idiom claiming that New Yorkers never look up rings true for residents of almost any city. They would, however, be compelled to look up if all the sudden the night sky looked as it does in this series. Thierry Cohen’s Darkened Cities features images of cities like New York, Rio, and Tokyo submerged in pitch darkness, allowing starlight to seep back into view.
Cohen captured images of the night sky in remote areas that share the latitudes of his city subjects, and then placed them behind their respective skylines to provide the most accurate picture of what the night sky would look like in each location.
The images invoke a strange calm tinged with uneasiness as to why these famous urban centers are abandoned. This may be what it looks like all around the world if an EMP from outer space leaves all of our electronics lifeless. Adding to the effect of being rendered unable to do anything by a random cosmic occurrence, we’d suddenly be humbled further, reminded of how small we are relative to the vastness of the physical universe.
[via EMPTY KINGDOM]