Nightairs gathers Samuel James’s long-exposure photographs of fireflies in the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio, where twenty-six species of the beetle family Lampyridae have been identified. Nineteen of them communicate through bioluminescent courtship displays — flash patterns that shift in colour, duration and rhythm according to habitat, season and hour. Across four summers, from 2019 to 2022, James recorded these signals with exposures lasting from several seconds to an hour, letting the dark intervals between flashes become as legible as the light. What emerges is less a wildlife survey than a set of luminous scores: each image a compressed record of a mating conversation performed at the very end of an insect’s one- to two-year life.
The book, designed by Hans Gremmen and published by Fw:Books, treats the sequence as a form in itself. Its 80 pages at 25 by 32 centimetres give the photographs an unusually wide, almost nocturnal field, while James’s own text supplies the natural-historical frame without over-explaining the images. The result is a quiet, exacting object: a photographic study of animal behaviour that is also a meditation on time, habitat and the limits of human observation.
For collectors, Nightairs stands out not through claims of rarity but through the precision of its premise and the clarity of its execution. It demonstrates how a sustained, single-subject body of work can be paced and edited into a book whose subject — light appearing and disappearing on warm nights — is inseparable from its physical form. James is the sole photographer credited, and the volume’s text is his; no broader editorial apparatus is required to make the photographs legible as both field record and visual essay.
Nightairs is a serious addition to the shelf of anyone interested in contemporary nature photography, in the photobook as a considered sequence, or in the ways photography can register ecological attention over time. It holds a specific place: southern Ohio, a handful of summer nights, and a phenomenon that is both ordinary and vanishing.
