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Teri Havens

Teri has been photographing fragments of American culture as a way of connecting with the world around her for the past twenty-five years. After studying photojournalism at the University of Texas and serving as an intern at the Magnum photo agency in New York, Teri developed her printmaking skills in darkrooms improvised in kitchens and motel rooms across the country.

In 2012, after years of being primarily a “daylight” photographer, Teri started experimenting with night photography. Using moonlight or available streetlight she began new series of social landscapes that reveal a lonely, yet enduring portrait of a nearly forgotten America.

Teri currently lives in Marble, Colorado. When not lost in the backcountry, or in her darkroom producing palladium prints, she can be found in her beloved 1988 Ford Van on the track of the perfect roadside bar. Her work has been exhibited internationally and published in The London Sunday Times, The Sun and on the NPR website. In 2010 she was a Terry O’Neill finalist, and received a Puffin Foundation grant in 2012. 

Website: terihavens.com

Last Light

There is solace in the night. I find it comforting when the sun finally slips away, taking with it the expectations and disappointments of the day. Darkness shrouds the superfluous, concealing the flaws of the world  - or at least muting them temporarily. Things that have only a supporting role in daylight take center stage under the stark beam of a streetlight or the silken glow of a full moon. I’m attracted to old structures that stand detached and self-sufficient: a church, rigidly upright on an abandoned plain refusing to kneel to the earth’s inevitable reclamation; a liquor store beckoning like a cinderblock Shangri –La; an aging trailer home, once a symbol of life untethered, now settled into permanent stasis, enduring as a monument to the fortitude of the life within.

And then there are the bars.

I’ve always had a thing for bars.  The more marginal the better. I’m mostly drawn to outliers - raw, dilapidated joints that evoke an earlier, grittier era. Humble, solitary structures cloaked in loneliness and isolation, yet miraculously - as if blessed by some divine patron- still open. An authentic down-to-its-rotting-bones refuge where a hard-edged world is numbed and softened by alcohol and dim lighting.  

Defiant vestiges of the past, the bar always seems the last to go. After the grocery store, the lumberyard and the barbershop surrendered to the future and shut their doors for the final time, the bar stayed on. Slumped alone on the edge of a discarded town, its neon spills out onto the asphalt and burns through the night.

Inside, the beer is cold, and the jukebox is stocked with George Jones and dirges from an irretrievable past.

Text and photography by Teri Havens.

Teri Havens: ​Last Light

Juror’s review

Despite their compositional contribution and importance, it is not the lights that take the leading role in Teri Havens’s series Last Light. Certainly, they have an important, even determining function in shaping the visual characteristics of the images by illuminating the scenes photographed. Not only that, but they are also the last sources of light in most of these places. They gain even more importance, however, because of what they shed light on. Although we cannot spot a soul in the images, there is still a strong feel of human presence in the illuminated places where people may find shelter, company, and may take rest after a long day. It is the invisible but warm and welcoming inside that is contrasted with the coldly lit outside. Beautiful as they are in their rough and grim reality, we are inclined to escape the external world: to open and enter through one of the doors offered as an exit from the austere outside.

Zsolt Bátori