We aren’t supposed to see Southern California’s modernist homes the way Tom Blachford captures them—not as nature intended, at least. The Melbourne-based photographer’s fourth and final release of Midnight Modern, a long-running series culminating with 12 new pieces at New York’s TOTH GALLERY, casts midcentury homes in and around Palm Springs in the type of light only darkness knows best: moonlight.
After five years of shooting in the dark—totaling nine trips, the light of seven full moons, and one supermoon—Blachford’s final series renders the desert’s brilliant modernist homes in a cinematic, celestial glow. The effect, an almost haunted perspective captured in one- to two-minute exposures, is one that even each home’s owner might never have seen before (considering that Blachford gets his shot hours after midnight).
“Midnight Modern started with me crawling the streets at night, not knowing a soul in the town or really anything about the architecture, what I was looking at or what I was looking for,” says Blachford, noting that Palm Springs homeowners initially saw him point-blank: a stranger lurking outside at 2 a.m., photographing their house. It wasn’t his best look.
But after seeing his photographs, neighbors went from side-eye to starry-eyed, and more homeowners began to stalk him in return, inviting Blachford back in hopes that he might capture their own abodes, too.
“I actually just got married to my longtime partner, Kate Ballis, in the backyard of a house that I fell in love with on my first trip to Palm Springs five years ago,” says Blachford. “The owners—who are now dear friends—insisted we marry in the house we loved so much.”
In his latest series, however, Blachford is no longer married to modernism, or even to Palm Springs.
“This series was about breaking out of midcentury and Palm Springs to explore some of the more distant reaches of modernism and the fantastical forms it could take,” says Blachford. “It allowed me to include homes that were built much later and some, like the FUTURO, that really evoke a sci-fi aesthetic that is far more reminiscent of my Nihon Noir series I shot in 2017 in Tokyo.”
Pegged to the rerelease of his book (originally released last year), Blachford’s latest series stars legendary properties on the fringe of the architectural period, from Kendrick Bangs Kellogg’s Doolittle House to Oller & Pejic Architecture’s Black Desert House. And in a personal victory, Blachford finally managed to photograph John Lautner’s iconic Sheats-Goldstein house, his favorite house in the world.
What’s the next chapter for Blachford? “I have since fallen for a lot of work from the postmodern aesthetic and will be spending my next couple of years exploring work from that era,” he says.
As for now, and on exhibit through November 4, his final series of Midnight Modern continues to bring moonlight into the spotlight.