Listening to the Music of the Night

YUICHI HIBI moved to New York from Japan in 1987, when he was 22. He was an aspiring actor, but spoke no English. For him, the city was bleak, grimy and alienating, the New York of “Taxi Driver” and “Midnight Cowboy,” gritty films he had watched as a teenager in Japan. He spent many late nights sitting in bars, watching people and wanting to be seen as one of them.

In 1992, Mr. Hibi began walking the streets from midnight to dawn with a point-and-shoot camera, recording the Manhattan he had come to love. Intoxicated by the silence and the solitude of the night, he took marathon strolls in the city’s darkest corners, an activity that inspired in him a mental state akin to meditative ecstasy. His photographs of nighttime Manhattan capture the dreamlike romance of these all-night journeys.

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