The way Xavier Nuez captured these photographs of American ruins is utterly remarkable

There's a technique at the heart of Xavier Nuez's photography that's well worth knowing about. Every image in his Alleys & Ruins series—a body of work spanning a quarter century, 30-plus American cities and more than 1,200 nights—was lit by hand. Not from the side, not from a tripod. From inside the frame.

Xavier himself walked through each scene in total darkness, holding coloured lights and building layers during exposures that sometimes ran to 90 minutes. The camera can't see him because he keeps moving. Only the light registers on the negative. He's both everywhere in these photographs and completely absent from them.

The results are extraordinary. Derelict warehouses, collapsed interiors, and forgotten alleyways become theatrical, saturated and strange. It's as if someone had art-directed a post-apocalyptic film set and then left before the shoot. The before-and-after comparison between the daytime location and the finished photograph is often hard to believe.

This is the same technique, broadly, that light-painting enthusiasts have used for decades. But what Xavier has done differently is apply it with obsessive rigour to medium-format film over 25 years of work.

The resulting photographic memoir, Alleys & Ruins: From Breakdown to Beauty, will be published in September through Gypsy Press. The New York Times has called it a "masterpiece." The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies has called the book "an important work".

Clinical psychologist Dr Lyssa Menard of Northwestern University, meanwhile, describes it as "a psychologically precise and unusually compelling account of trauma and recovery, and a rare example of creative practice functioning as self-repair."

When it comes to Xavier's own life story, that last phrase is the one that matters most.

A creative paradox

Here's what happened. In 1987, Xavier walked into a job interview and, as he puts it, his brain snapped. What followed—years before Complex PTSD had a name or a place in the diagnostic manual—was a nervous system collapse that made ordinary life unbearable.

Conversations were terrifying. Social situations were intolerable. He saw over a dozen clinicians. None had the right map. What he discovered instead, almost by accident, was that wandering dangerous alleys and abandoned ruins at night calmed his system.

"I now understand I was returning to environments that matched how I felt inside," he says. The ruined, the abandoned, the threatening: these were his comfort zone, because they matched the landscape he was already living in. In 1993, he quit his job and began shooting them.

The paradox that emerges from the work is one that all creatives will recognise in some form: the conditions that produce the work are not the conditions you'd choose.

Xavier was, by his own account, terrified of a simple conversation, but fearless in a Detroit ruin at 2am. He had guns pointed at him. Gangs chased him through ruins and dark alleys. Yet he kept going back. "In every photograph," he writes, "the subject matter says run, and the light says stay."

A technique built from constraints

His process is almost wilfully impractical. He scouts locations during the day, returns after dark with bags of kit, and then spends hours, sometimes an entire night, building a single image. He works with a 1967 Hasselblad on medium format film. He uses coloured gels, spotlights and flash units, walking through the frame in a black hoodie, illuminating surfaces one at a time during a single long exposure.

The following image of the Acme Banana Co. in Pittsburgh makes this point with particular clarity.

The left panel shows a tired, flat brick building in harsh daylight. The right panel, shot at 3am on a 90-minute exposure, is theatrical, saturated and strange. The beams glow amber, the doorways blush deep red, the pipework catches blue. It looks like a stage set. It's the same building.

The technique is laborious by any standard, and it requires a specific kind of creative courage: the willingness to work entirely without feedback. You can't chimp the results on a screen. You can't adjust in post. Each exposure is a commitment, and the image only exists once the film is processed.

For any photographer trained in the instant gratification of digital, it's a useful counterpoint. More broadly, for anyone making creative work under difficult conditions, there's something almost instructive about the monastic patience it demands.

The accidental therapy

The book's central story is that Xavier invented a form of art therapy specifically calibrated to his injury, then practised it with monastic devotion for a quarter-century. "I had done to these places exactly what I had done to myself for 35 years," he writes. "Hidden the wreckage behind a surface so convincing that no one thought to look beneath it."

Xavier's family background adds further weight to the tale. His father fled Franco's Spain, lived on the streets, then endured decades of humiliation in a small steel town in Quebec. The son—who was born in Montreal and now lives in Chicago—inherited more than he knew. Xavier's diagnosis of Complex PTSD came 35 years after the original collapse, not from a clinician but from the process of writing the book itself.

Even if you don't know this background, the images stand up on their own: nocturnal, theatrical, technically astonishing. But knowing what drove them changes the way you look at them. The light isn't just compositional; it's redemptive.

The key takeaway

For creatives, the question this work poses is an uncomfortable but useful one: what are you actually making when you make your work?

Sometimes the answer is just what it appears to be. But sometimes, as Nuez discovered over 1,200 nights in the dark, "the toughest alleys I ever entered weren't in Chicago or Detroit or Brooklyn. They were in my mind, and these pages are what I brought back."