Bart Koetsier roamed Europe for a decade, driven by a dark romantic longing for the big city ‘after closing time’. Drawn to the seamy side of a smoothed-out culture, he got lost in the anarchic nighttime street life, photographing the grubby, unpolished and unbridled scenes that unfolded before his eyes. Koetsier has witnessed and documented it all without wanting to participate. Free of judgment, he recorded how the bourgeoisie transforms into a more animalistic form of itself, how the intoxication of the nightlife mixes with the perfume of the streets and with those for whom all this is a ‘fait accompli’.
‘Noctambule’ is a compression of an elongated experience, of disappearing into the night; a blurry period in which Koetsier deliberately surrendered himself for ten years to anonymity, to situations over which no one seemed to really have control. In the book, the viewer is drawn into the obscure allure of the bohemian ‘wonderland’ that only looms between dusk and dawn.
