25 Jun 2026

Bright Nights

by Tod Seelie

Photos by Tod Seelie

The 2000s and 2010s were a great time to be alive in New York City. The explosion of culture and music, combined with the seemingly limitless infusion of financial support for brand-sponsored events, produced a heady, intoxicating atmosphere with turbo-charged nightlife. I was fortunate to document a lot of it with an early digital camera, and I kept at it for over 15 years.

This work culminated in the 2013 publication of BRIGHT NIGHTS: Photographs of Another New York, a monograph from Prestel Publishing. The book documents the evolution of an idea that had formed with my undergraduate thesis: a portrait of a place. I tried to present a balanced, multifaceted view of the NYC I had been living in: one with basement punk shows, parties on top of bridges, and weird art projects, but also quiet moments on the street, and portraits of friends at home.

The NYC in these photos is not ancient history, but it is of another time. It’s the last gasp of freedom before mobile social media took over our lives, and remade the way we view, move through, and experience the world. When you see Matt & Kim performing to an almost literal wave of fans crashing against the stage, there’s not a phone in sight. Looking back, there was an overall sense of innocence and optimism that seems naive and antiquated to me now.

I’m currently working on a sequel of sorts, taking the same approach and widening it to include all of America. The photos in the next book were made during the same time period, but they span the whole country: junk raft voyages on the Mississippi River, riding the rails in the Midwest, scavenging for art in Detroit and bike punk parties in New Orleans. Abandoned villages in California, side by side with new golf courses constructed in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Thanks to a residency last year from MUSUKU in Berlin, I have made a lot of progress on the edit. Now I just have to find an interested publisher—and that, too, has gotten a lot more difficult in the years since then.