It is not long after sunset. Some blue still remains in the sky, and the clouds are massed dark. A lamp hung on the stone wall to the left draws the rough grain of the stone up in yellow, and another lamp shines faintly from a wall deeper in the alley. The ground between them is dark as if wet, and the paved stone road shows its shape only as far as the light reaches.
The spot the eye stays on longest in the photograph is the gap in the door on the right. Through the door that has not been closed, the light inside leaks out in a thin line. The lamps were lit by the village, and that line was lit by someone inside. Two kinds of light meet in the same alley.
The alley in the evening is always someone's way home from work and someone's way home from school. The child with a bag on their back, the person who has finished a day's labor, the elderly person carrying a shopping basket, all of them walk home relying on this much brightness. Deciding where to hang the lamps and how many to light looks like a budget line, but it is really deciding the evening of the people who walk that road.
Between one lamp and the next there is always a dark stretch. Like the pitch-black interior in the middle of the photograph, some people always have to pass through that stretch. Darkness is not fair, in that a place short of light is hard to see until an accident happens.
Looking at the photograph again, this alley is by no means bright. The reason it still looks worth walking into is not that there are many lamps but that someone is still keeping them lit. You find yourself looking once more for that thin line in the gap of the door.
