Photos from the Archive: Gilles Peress’s “Nighttown”

In the January 8, 2001 issue of the magazine, The New Yorker published “Nighttown,” a portfolio of photographs by Gilles Peress. To shoot the portfolio, a look at late-night New York during the final months of the last millennium, Peress adopted a nocturnal schedule. “I inverted everything in my life,” he says. He slept through the short winter days, woke up around nine o’clock, and headed out shortly before midnight. Peress says that he was especially impressed by the interconnectedness of New York’s late-night scene. The people he photographed, he told me, “know each other a lot more than day people know each other. It’s a world made out of distinctions—sexual preferences, personal taste—but there is also a certain unity, something that binds the separate cultures. The night: that’s what they all have in common.” As if to illustrate this theme, “Nighttown” tracks subtle motifs—a hand gesture, a facial expression—as they recur across incongruous subjects and settings.

In anticipation of The New Yorker’s upcoming move, to One World Trade Center, the magazine’s photo department has begun to sort through decades’ worth of photo books, prints, and research materials. Check back at the end of each month this year for a look back at a feature from our archive.