Medianoche

Medianoche photographs the small rituals of a night out: the glance, the touch on an arm, the drink held a beat too long, staged in the bars and clubs where courtship still runs on old signals.

Rafael Arocha shot the series between 2009 and 2011 in Belgrade, Madrid, Barcelona, and other Spanish cities, working close and in available light. He self-published the fifty-two black-and-white images as an 84-page hardcover in 2014, in an edition of 500, with no text, and the book is distributed by Dalpine. The design keeps the pictures unbroken by captions, so the sequence itself carries the narrative of a night moving toward its later hours.

Arocha, born in Gran Canaria in 1978 and based in Barcelona, considers Medianoche his first book. It won first prize at the 2015 Cordoba Biennial for Self-Publishing and was a finalist for the Rencontres d'Arles Book Award, and it remains the work most identified with his nocturnal, observational approach to street photography.