Imagining a World Without Light

French photographer Julien Mauve used a remote-triggered flash to create this image from his series After Lights Out.

Inspired by directors like Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton, Mauve tries to create a unified aesthetic for the photographs in each of his series.

In After Lights Out, Mauve imagines a world that has lost all electricity except for a single light source.

"Electricity is something we take for granted," Mauve says. "It's no longer magic for us, it's just how things work."

Each of the images in the series depicts a depopulated, twilight world—it could be either dawn or dusk.

Mauve shot the images all over the world, including in Argentina, South Korea, Japan, and his native France.

Less important than where the photograph was shot is the feeling Mauve wants to evoke in his viewers.

Mauve says he loves science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind because of their immersive atmosphere.

Mauve works hard to color-correct each of the images to ensure the aesthetic integrity of the series.

Mauve wants the images to seem like stills from the same movie, united by a somber palette of dark blues and grays.

Mauve's photography returns again and again to the theme of humans' relationship to technology and our natural environment.

Mauve shot this image early in the morning in Seoul, South Korea, when a single light source could be seen against the dark urban landscape.

Mauve wants to foster an ecological awareness in viewers without lecturing them. "I just want to make people wonder and question what they're seeing," he says.

The single point of light in each image represents hope that humanity can ward off the various existential crises, such as global warming, that confront us.

"I'm an optimistic person, so I'm hoping that we'll try to face the dangers," Mauve says. "Because what we're doing right now is not working."