Polar Night — Mark Mahaney

This photobook by Mark Mahaney, published by Trespasser in its second edition in 2021, is part of the Darwin Bookshop because it documents, with cinematic quietude and precise darkness, the final days of Polar Night in Utqiaġvik, Alaska—America’s northernmost town. Shot in January 2019, the work unfolds in the long shadows of perpetual twilight, where the sun does not rise for over two months. Mahaney's photographs resist cliché: there is no anthropological theatre, no romanticism. Instead, the images are hushed, minimal, and reverent—rendering snowy terrain and quiet interiors as metaphysical thresholds. The surface of the book itself—deep matte black with POLAR and NIGHT stamped like a code—echoes the book's mood of vast silence. Designed in collaboration with Cody Haltom, and printed in Turkey by Offset Yapimevi, the object balances the poetic with the procedural. Adam Popescu’s opening text and Mahaney’s own closing words frame the images with a considered voice, but the real story here is one of light’s refusal, and how humans, houses, and snow machines keep glowing inside it.

Title
Polar Night

Artist / Author
Mark Mahaney

Date
2021 (Second Edition)

Technique / Printing Method
Offset printed

Medium / Materials
Softcover photobook, matte black cover with foil text

Edition
Second edition

Dimensions (cm)
Approx. 28 x 22 cm

Language (books)
English

Pages (books)
Unstated

Publisher / Editor (books)
Trespasser, Austin

ISBN
978-0-578-58133-0

Condition
New