On display in the hallway gallery at Central Bank of Boone County in downtown Columbia
January 6 - February 16
Artist Statement
In 1998, I enrolled in an intermediate photography class at MU with Professor Oliver Schuchard. Our class assignment was to create and submit a topic for the end-of-semester portfolio. For reasons both pragmatic and creative, nighttime offered me the best opportunity to wander our city’s streets in search of inspiration and vision, so I selected Night Photography as my topic and began to photograph downtown Columbia in earnest. This portfolio topic, chosen 28 years ago, led to an obsession with night photography and to a long-term project to document downtown Columbia at night. The earliest photographs in this body of work stretch back to 1996, with creative peaks occurring in 1998, 2001, 2003, 2011, and 2013. From 1996 to 2010, I was making my photographs on film with a manual focus camera and a tripod. In 201,0 I shifted over to digital image making and moved away from the use of black and white film and a tripod in much of my photography.
When I started photographing Columbia at night, I was on a quest to find scenes that displayed the visual magic and the poetry of a city after dark. I was fascinated by the beauty revealed by the darkness of night, and I recognized the power of darkness to transform the quotidian into something elegant and mysterious.
In 2009, when I moved back to Columbia and began working on night photography again, my drive and my purpose shifted from artistic fascination to historic preservation. The Columbia that I had photographed in the late 1990s was changing, and features of the architectural landscape were disappearing and being replaced. My goal was now very clear, and it was to document the Columbia I knew before it changed and disappeared. The images displayed in this exhibit range from artistic fascination to historic preservation, and my hope is that the body of work will help to preserve the history, the architecture, and the beauty of nighttime Columbia.
Artist Bio
Stephen Bybee has been a resident of Columbia since 1995. In 1994, Stephen graduated from Westminster College with a degree in English and then moved to Colorado for a year to serve as a volunteer for the US Forest Service. Upon returning to Columbia, Stephen studied art and photography at Columbia College and Mizzou and spent much of his free time documenting downtown Columbia at night and rural Missouri by day.
Stephen currently serves as the project director for Missouri Conservation Corps, an environmental nonprofit started in 2021, where he helps to promote and lead the group’s mission-related activities in the Columbia area. Stephen is also president of the Columbia Historic Preservation Commission, a member of the Columbia Tree Board, Vice President of the County House Branch Neighborhood Association, and is an active volunteer for groups such as Missouri River Relief, True/False Film Festival, Access Arts School of Service, Boone County History and Culture Center, and the Food Bank for Central and Northeast Missouri.
Stephen is truly committed to the power of volunteers to positively benefit and transform our community. When he has free time, Stephen enjoys photography, reading, running on an amateur level, and researching and preserving the history of Columbia and of central Missouri. Stephen has a website for his nighttime photography called stephenbybee.com.
