New York-based photographer Eric Kogan took this picture on a family day of furniture and thrift-store hunting in Shelton, Connecticut, about a 90-minute drive from their Brooklyn home. En route, they stopped off in New Haven for a pizza. “The city is famous for its top-notch pizza restaurants,” Kogan says. “And the one we chose, Frank Pepe’s, is rumoured to have invented the first-ever pizza box!” After lunch they continued on to Shelton, pulling into the large parking lot of a furniture sample store a little before 4pm.
“It was so tucked away that we kept questioning if we were heading in the right direction,” Kogan says. “The moon came into view as we made our way to the entrance. The sun had just set and it was semi-daylight out. I searched for the perfect place to stand. I also had to underexpose the frame a bit, turning it down until the moon felt right: luminous and detailed against its subdued surroundings.”
Kogan decided to leave the security cameras in the image untouched. “It might have been cleaner without them, but, besides cropping and adjusting values, it’s not in my practice to remove things from photos.”
Kogan’s wife, Melissa Breyer, is also a photographer; her image of a deli worker washing a window featured in a Smart shot column in 2022. Kogan insists that, partly because their styles are so different, there is no competition between the pair. “Works by both of us travel to so many places that they’ve almost taken on a life of their own. We met through photography and our photos have found themselves to Smart shot independently. It doesn’t get better than that!”
