City at Night

Brenda Reed is a public services librarian in the Education Library at
Queen’s University.

City at Night is a quirky, inquisitive photographic glimpse of city life
between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Photographer Peter Jestadt went to Vancouver,
Toronto, Montreal, and New York, and photographed people who work into
or through the night. The table of contents organizes the 21 two-page
photographic layouts into half-hour intervals that correspond to the
time at which each photograph could have been taken. For example, the
ending of a concert is placed at 10:30 p.m., while the all-night Yonge
Street bus is entered at 3:30 p.m. Each series of photographs is
accompanied by a brief narrative that provides a context for the images
and points out the sometimes unusual or unknown features of that
particular night job.

Sometimes the city in which the photographs were taken is identified;
Island Airport is placed in Toronto, for example, and the Salon du Livre
in Montreal. Other times, the location is not specified. Union Station,
for example, is identified not as a Toronto landmark, but as a “grand
railway station” of a type found all across North America. Readers who
want to know where such photographs were taken will find clues in the
acknowledgments at the end of the book. Another gap in information is
evident on the top left corner of every double-page spread, where the
same photograph of a city skyline appears but is nowhere labeled.

This is a book that should be enjoyed for its emphasis on the diversity
of night life in our cities, rather than for its depth of information.
Elementary classroom teachers will find the book useful as a supplement
for discussions of time, diverse lifestyles, and Canadian cities. For
those with tight budgets City at Night is not a first-choice purchase.
It can be recommended for Canadian classrooms and libraries, however,
because it offers readers a vision of Canada that they may never have
encountered before.