Film Noir
Film noir in photography adapts noir cinema’s strong contrast, deep shadows, and selective lighting to create mysterious urban scenes that suggest threat or unease.
In photography, Film Noir refers to a stylistic approach that borrows its mood, narratives, and visual logic from mid-twentieth-century crime and suspense cinema. The label was coined by French critics in the 1940s to describe certain Hollywood films and is now used retrospectively for works whose pessimism, moral ambivalence, and focus on illicit behavior or sexual intrigue appear to echo the social disillusionment associated with the Depression and World War II. Historically, its formation is commonly linked to German Expressionist lighting and set design, the hardboiled tradition in American crime fiction, and, for some commentators, earlier currents such as French Poetic Realism or Italian Neorealism. Photographic noir picks up this atmosphere of cynicism and corruption, often presenting figures as trapped or complicit within opaque urban worlds.
In practical terms, noir photography is characterized by low-key lighting and strong chiaroscuro, with deep blacks, bright highlights, and deliberately restrained mid-tones. Single, directional point sources placed to the side or behind the subject create sharp, elongated shadows rather than even illumination. Gobos are used to project patterned shadows—such as window blinds or railings—across faces and walls, while silhouettes and backlit figures conceal identity and heighten mystery. Unusual camera angles, including Dutch tilts, reinforce tension or psychological unease. Typical settings are night streets, alleyways, bars, tunnels, and other dense urban environments.
Debates around noir in photography broadly follow those in film theory, asking whether it is best described as a genre, a stylistic mode, or a recurring mood; how its deliberately constructed lighting challenges documentary expectations of realism; and whether working in monochrome is necessary or mainly a convention. Later color practices, often described as neo-noir or neon-noir, carry noir’s shadows, ambiguity, and narrative suggestion into saturated color palettes and contemporary settings.