We have many words for the slow passage from day to night or night to day: twilight, dusk, gloaming, dawn, daybreak. Despite all our names for it, however, it’s hard to capture the way this particular passage of time makes us feel, that soft bruising combination of anticipation and regret, the sense that something that we know is ending, fading, and that something we don’t understand is falling all around us with its own sort of shudder of promise. It’s hard to capture that in words or images because it’s the changing that hits us and stops us in our tracks. And yet somehow Patrick Joust has done it. All the sky changes are here: the falling night, the coming rain, the gathering clouds, the sort of electric heaviness when the light is changing but the sky is so full of clouds you feel more than see it, that moment when the sky is still glowing but all around you the earth is hushed in shadows.

In Joust’s street photography, when people are the subject it often feels like there’s a connection between the photographer and the photographed, a complicity, a mutual understanding. It is the same in these landscapes, an unspoken understanding between the viewer and the spirit of the place, whether of his home city of Baltimore or farther afield in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, or New Mexico. The sky hits differently all over the country, all over the world, and we feel that in these images. In these portraits of spaces and places and times of day, Joust has captured all of this, with his trademark cool quiet eloquence and grace.

Patrick Joust is a Baltimore-based photographer, librarian, and occasional pontificator. To see more photos, go to my flickr page. I’m on Instagram and facebook. You can also find a more manageable portfolio on my web page. If you like my Baltimore photographs, check out my wife’s tumblr, Glitter Beneath the Rot, to get her perspective on life in Baltimore City schools.