Dusk: Between Light and Shadow

This photograph was taken near Vile, on the western side of the Limfjord in northern Denmark. The Danish word for dusk is tusmørke - literally ‘between dark’ - a description that fits this moment perfectly. The sun has gone, yet the sky still holds its colour; light softens, shapes blur, and the day slips into another register.

English once had many words for this in-between time: gloaming, evenfall, eventide. But dusk endured, an ancient Germanic word from roots that meant ‘dark, smoky, hazy’.

I took this picture at the end of a warm evening, when the air was still and the light lay low across the fjord. The reflection makes it hard to tell where the sky ends and the surface begins, which seems fitting for a word born to describe uncertainty - neither day nor night, but the space between.