October 2023-August 2025
Edition of fifteen artist books
Letterpress and risograph
In the fall of 2023, I started to notice that the City of Philadelphia was replacing sodium streetlights in my neighborhood with energy-efficient LED lights. This was part of Philly Streetlight Improvement Project, which launched in August 2023 with the plan to replace all 130,000 streetlights in Philadelphia with LEDs by the end of 2025. The project is “the largest energy conservation project the city has ever undertaken.”1 Estimated to reduce municipal carbon emissions by ten percent, the new streetlights started going up around the city, with the first replacements just ten blocks west of my own neighborhood.2 Several articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer highlighted the scale of the project, light pollution, and the research on claims that brighter and more thorough streetlighting would reduce crime.3 Then, about how to contact 311 to request to have an LED light dimmed so it would illuminate your bedroom less, or with details about the project’s progress.4
As the Philly Streetlight Improvement Project got underway in 2023, I was more than six years into my PhD in the history and sociology of science and I was spending my days reading, researching, and writing about belonging, and what happens when places change. Spanning several decades of oral histories, I traced the way that people talked about their homes in New York City’s rural watershed, examining how changes in that landscape affected ideas about belonging, home, and place. As the streetlights in my neighborhood were replaced, I realized I, too, was tracking and change in my home place.
This artist book is about what this change feels like.
There’s an odd, ironic twinge in being an environmentalist who is mourning the expansion of energy-efficient LED lights. Literary scholar and environmental humanist Jennifer Ladino call the feeling of this this contraction among emotions, feelings, beliefs, and knowledge “affective dissonance.” This is, she writes, “the unsettled state in which we experience more than one feeling at the same time, often with a sense of conflictedness.”5 In Streetlights, I wrote about the importance of reducing energy use in our largely coal-powered city, and also about the sense of loss as the “LED light flattens the street.” Affective dissonance infuses the book.
In documenting the affective and visual impact of changing streetlights, this artist book reckons with how we relate to subtle changes in the places to which we belong.
1 Anna Orso, “Philly Will Replace Every Streetlight over the next Two Years, Starting with High-Crime Neighborhoods,” Philadelphia Politics, Politics, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), August 8, 2023, https://www.inquirer.com/politics/philadelphia/philly-to-get-all-new-streetlights-20230808.html.
2 “Construction Begins on Philadelphia Streetlight Improvement Project,” Development, West Philly Local (Philadelphia, PA), August 9, 2023, https://www.westphillylocal.com/2023/08/09/construction-begins-on-philadelphia-streetlight-improvement-project/.
3 Henry Savage, “Philly’s New Energy-Saving LED Streetlights May Reduce Crime and Fatal Crashes. But What about Light Pollution?,” Philadelphia News, News, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), February 22, 2024, https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/philadelphia-led-street-lights-crime-traffic-safety-light-pollution.html.
4 Michelle Myers, “Why Philly’s New LED Streetlights Are so Bright, and How to Get Them Dimmed,” Philadelphia News, News, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), August 2, 2025, https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/philadelphia-led-street-lights-brightness-crime-safety-20250802.html.
5 Jennifer Ladino, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (University of Nevada Press, 2019), 22.