Walking alone through the suburbs at night, everything that exists during the day seems to soften and be enveloped in an alternate world of textural streetlight. Have you ever noticed how black the shadows are in suburbia? It’s not like that on city streets where the lights create a flat white plane. In the suburbs they illuminate in pools, reflecting off garden shrubs, creating deep black recesses where luminescence doesn’t fall. I’ve noticed that there is a strange darkness here in New Zealand where the greens are thick and lush, imbued with the velvet of heavy shadow even in bright sunlight. At night their verdant warmth is edged with silver and the flare of hard light on lustred evergreen leaves.

I’m not sure when I started seeing the streetlight creatures, maybe when I was a teenager and first venturing out at night on my own. I’m imagining that you have seen them too, flickering in the corner of your eye. It’s a bit of a treat to see one, they’re scary but in the way of a large spider on your doorstep, enough for a shiver but not enough to give you nightmares or make you afraid to go out. They seem so far away it’s as if they are phantoms from another world. The distance and incorporeality meant their sudden nocturnal emergence didn’t seem threatening in the ways one might expect. I wanted to know what they were and more than anything, to see them clearly for once rather than the fleeting glances I’d had so far. I thought that by capturing their image I could find out if anyone else had seen them too – and I knew in my heart I couldn’t be the only one.

The first time I tried to photograph them I was living in a central suburb where the soil was volcanic and the vegetation particularly lush. It was also an older area so the street lights were spaced apart and a little erratic. I’ve noticed that the spacing of the lights is important; a pool of light should form a perfect halo, trapping the darkness outside. I don’t believe the entities ever appear in the city, but equally I don’t think they favour rural areas either and I suspect this might be due to a lack of concentrated electrical activity. A curious trait of these creatures is to manifest near electrical transformer boxes and in areas with converging electrical wires running either above or underground. This suburb, the remanent of a volcanic flow, was perfect in all these aspects.

Initially I tried using my phone, carrying it already raised at head height and finger on the button ready to press the moment I saw movement. But I just wasn’t fast enough, the creatures were too transient to be captured by my clumsy reactions. I also discovered that the number of cars passing by, even late at night, caused an issue with the length of time the entities would manifest. As soon as headlights began to illuminate the road it would disturb any pool of streetlight resulting in the creatures emerging as a fleeting, wavering impression, impossible to capture.

Later, I found a suburb further from the city where the environment was almost perfect for watching these creatures. The roadsides were manicured with streetlights spaced apart, no pedestrians, no traffic, the vegetation thick and glossy. I was also able to borrow a professional camera and tripod allowing me the ability to do fast burst shots that captured anything the moment it appeared. I concealed myself in the bushes like a birdwatcher in a hide, sitting, waiting patiently. To be honest the hiding was more to avoid cars and the occasional foot traffic than the entities, as they didn’t seem to know or care that I existed. I discovered the best method was to turn my head and look obliquely out of the corner of my eye at the spot I anticipated them to appear. Looking directly was pointless and I would always miss them, but the side-eye allowed me to trigger the camera the very moment I saw a shimmer. There were three locations that were particularly attractive to the entities so I staked them out, sometimes for hours at a time.

It took a great deal of patience but finally in February 2024 I had success. Once I had those first photos it was like an avalanche and suddenly I had image after image and was seeing them clearly for the first time. I think its fair to say they weren’t what I expected. Previously having only caught glimpses of them I imagined something a bit more ethereal, perhaps ghostly, but the photos show them to be odd, colourful and strangely comical. They were intent on enacting repetitive encounters with each other over and over like recordings stuck on repeat. There were different sorts of creatures too and I started naming them with descriptors that were loosely related to their appearance or actions. For example there were the ones I called the ‘Receivers’ because they seemed to siphon information out of each other with staccato gestures like creepy little jawas in pointed hoods and trailing robes. More often than not their interactons would be with the ones I thought of as the ‘Speakers’. These ones only had their mouths visible and could be seen passing messages to the Receivers. Where the other entities I saw would appear on their own, I've never witnessed the Speakers as anything but a duo. If there is any sort of hierarchy in this weird pantheon the imperious attitude of the Speakers would make them the most important.

My greatest coup was a series showing the full interaction between yellow Speakers and a red Receiver carrying a golden box. In the photos the suburban roadside is seen empty and tranquil before a red Receiver appears fully formed under the streetlight in a hooded robe with none of the spectral fading you see through the naked eye. The next frame sees the approaching yellow figures of the Speakers with tall hats and obscured eyes. This leads to the most amazing occurrence where we see the Speakers each in turn put their mouths to the open golden box held up by the Receiver. As soon as the transaction is complete they are suddenly gone, leaving nothing behind. What you need to understand is that this transpires in a couple of seconds and would never have been seen by a passer-by witnessing them in the usual corner-of-the-eye manner. Up until this point they had appeared to me only as wavering phantasms. Am I the first person to capture this?

So far the creatures were fairly benign and I honestly found them quite funny, but in March I captured something different. These two I call ‘Quadruped’ and ‘Depleted’ with quadruped in a comical fuzzy cowl with a weird cone stuck to it. Depleted appearing in the robes of a grey Receiver, which initially I thought it was but there is something about it that makes me feel it is corrupted or that there is an important aspect missing. Quadruped doesn’t have a humanoid frame, it’s crooked, broken. In the photo sequence it appears first crouching, maybe cowering, in the shadows before Depleted arrives and draws it out. Quadruped unfolds from its crouch into an uncomfortable upright stance leaning away from Depleted as if afraid - its body is wrong as if standing is painful. Depleted then raises its hands to Quadrupeds cone and if I had to guess what it is doing I’d say it was drawing something out of the poor creature. This whole interaction was disturbing and I’m not ashamed to say that looking at the photos made me afraid. I probably should have stopped there, I had so many photos already, I didn’t need more.

At this point I started seriously looking for information on these streetlight entities as I’d started to become more than just an observer. Looking at pictures of them wasn’t enough, I needed to know what they were and why they even existed. I trawled through pages and pages of old texts digitised and presented online, I visited message boards, reddit, forums for occultists and UFO researchers hoping to find someone who could tell me more. I just know that there are others out there that have seen them, I can feel it somehow that this phenomena is more pervasive then anyone is admitting. But any  material about it is so frustratingly lacking. So I just kept going, hoping to find more clues in the photos themselves. I kept visiting the same spots and it seemed that the more images I captured, the more I got. It was so exciting and there was something wonderful about observing the alien interactions of these odd entities while they remained completely oblivious to my presence.

After an evening shoot in late March I sifted through the nights images, recognising the familiar selection of the creatures going about their repetitive tasks. I stopped when I came across something that made my breath catch and my heart thump; a red Receiver in its funny pointy hood carrying a white globe and staring straight at the camera. Straight at me. I’d seen something like this before but it took me a moment to recognise the void-like pull of the same kind of creature I had seen tormenting the Quadruped. This wasn’t a Receiver, this was another Depleted, it’s hood an inky cavern and I could feel the hunger in its eyeless stare even through the image. I actually started to feel queasy and realised I was too frightened to look straight at the photo but needed to turn my head and perform the familiar side-eye to mitigate the effects of its gaze. Honestly it affected me so much that I started to wonder what I’d done and if I’d made a big mistake even taking this photo. But then I closed the file, felt ok, worked on some of the more familiar images and forgot about it.

The next few weeks brought almost constant heavy rain which meant I was unable to get out and about without risking the expensive camera. There is a particular kind of downpour I call ‘fat rain’ due to the size of the droplets and its ability to flood gutters and turn roads to rivers. It’s an instant soaking without decent rainwear but if you’ve got a good coat and don’t mind soggy air then walking in it is beautiful. A raincoat and hat become a private dwelling as you traverse the sodden world safe inside its warm, dry embrace. Once again the greens become the defining feature of this verdant realm as water imbues the dark vegetation with a shimmering gloss. To me the daytime world of glistening water and flora started to adopt an overlay of nights darkness. The muted presence of the creatures bled through. It was disconcerting, slightly frightening, and I wanted it all to go far away from the waking world back to where it belonged.

I was oddly forgetful and often had trouble remembering why I even felt this way. Looking at the world around me I started to have a distant feeling that I wasn’t quite certain who I was or where I was meant to be. My mind feels soft and unstable, each fragile leaf gradually floating away on the rivers of rain. I’d find myself standing on the street just staring at nothing, confused and alone, water pounding on my bare head. In the bushes like a latent image I would see the outline of that dark hood burned into my retinas and it was the only thing I could think about. I haven’t taken any photos for weeks or visited my favourite lookouts, I’ve even stopped examining the photos I have already taken. I feel ill when I think about them but I don’t know why. If you are reading this then I hope you will look at the images and tell me if you have any idea what’s happening to me. I can send them to you and I’m fairly sure you can examine them safely just as long you look at them sideways, out of the corner of your eye. The key is to never look at them directly, I think that is the mistake I made right from the beginning. If you decide to look at them please don’t consider taking any more. When I started this project I was naïve and hopeful that I was going to capture something beautiful. They were so content, going about their strange tasks and it was probably better that way. They didn’t notice us before, but they’re definitely aware of us now and for that I am sorry.