Alleys & Ruins
Press & Review Information
In 1987, I walked into a job interview and my brain snapped.
Within a day, I went from outgoing and confident to unable to hold a conversation. There was no diagnosis, no treatment, and no name for what I had.
Six years later, I walked into a dark alley at night with a camera, and the terror stopped. So I kept going. For twenty-five years and 1,200 nights, across more than 50 cities, I wandered the alleys and ruins of North America with a 50-year-old Hasselblad. I was chased by gangs and had guns pointed at me, but I returned every time, because the only place the fear couldn't find me was in the dark.
This is the story I planned to take to my grave.
Alleys & Ruins
a photographic memoir
304 pages · 240 photographs · 8.5 × 11 hardcover
Old Light Editions · September 2026 · Limited first edition of 1,000 copies
Complete 304-page book, including all photographs.
No registration required.
Alleys & Ruins no. 151, Razor
Philadelphia, 2017. 10:00 pm, 35-min exposure
Selected press on the photographic series
“Masterpiece” The New York Times
“The light isn't just compositional; it's redemptive” Creative Boom
“You will never see a dark alley the same way again” PBS
Praise for the book
“A psychologically precise and unusually compelling account of trauma and recovery – and a rare example of creative practice functioning as self-repair”
Dr. Lyssa Menard, Clinical Psychologist, Northwestern University
“An important work… a unique and powerful piece”
Dr. Anka Vujanovic, Editor-in-Chief, StressPoints, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS)
THE STORY
For twenty-five years, the public knew the photographs but not what the work was doing for the man who made them.
Alleys & Ruins tells two interlocking stories. One follows Xavier Nuez across North America, where he used long exposures and hand-held colored lights to transform abandoned urban spaces. The other begins with a 1987 nervous system collapse that made ordinary conversation terrifying, even as he felt calm in places most people avoided.
Nuez understood early that the alleys were helping him. Only decades later, while writing the book, did he begin to understand what had happened to him and why those places may have provided relief. The memoir reaches backward into his family’s history of poverty, migration, and inherited trauma, and forward to the final photograph in February 2020. What first appears to be a book about ruined places becomes a book about inheritance, camouflage, and making a life inhabitable.
“Alleys & Ruins documents a twenty-five-year quest to reclaim disowned psychological spaces by insistently occupying and depicting many of society's most forbidding physical spaces. It is an odyssey of discovery and redemption for both eye and mind”
Dr. Harold Kudler, Psychiatrist, Duke University
The same abandoned building by day and after illuminating it by hand during a long exposure
STORY ANGLES
Fear worked backward
Ordinary conversation could trigger terror; a Detroit ruin at 2 a.m. could calm it. The central mystery of the memoir is how danger became safety, and why the nervous system could reverse the meaning of both.
One photograph, half a night
A technical and creative-process story about film, long exposures, hand-held colored lights, and spending half a night constructing a single finished photograph in near-total darkness while everything around the camera remained unpredictable.
The public career built over a private collapse
Museums, exhibitions, collectors, and major press documented the work. Almost no one knew the psychiatric condition driving it, or that the photographs were helping their maker survive.
The therapy hiding inside the photographs
Long before Nuez recognized his condition as complex PTSD, the photographic ritual had already become a self-devised form of regulation and repair, combining long exposures, physical exertion, focused attention, and the transformation of threatening spaces.
A trauma memoir with the propulsion of an adventure story
Alleys & Ruins braids an intensely interior account of complex PTSD with twenty-five years of close calls, police encounters, strange characters, technical problem-solving, and photographs built in darkness. The adventure does not soften the trauma, and instead gives the reader momentum, contrast, and a way through it.
The inheritance beneath the work
Nuez places his own collapse within a family history shaped by poverty, his parent's flight from Franco’s Spain, immigration, humiliation, and the difficulty of belonging in Quebec.
City-specific photographs and stories are available for regional coverage, including Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and more.
INTERVIEW & SPEAKING TOPICS
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Complex PTSD from inside the condition
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Art as self-devised therapy
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Sustaining a twenty-five-year project without being commissioned, funded, or institutionally supported
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Medium-format night photography and light-painting technique
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Urban decay, abandonment, and what cities discard
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Immigration, belonging, and inherited trauma
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Hiding a psychiatric condition inside a public career
The location in daylight and the completed light-painted, night photograph.
“Your stories and photos brought me back to my midnight shifts on patrol. You were fast thinking and very smart out there. That's why you stayed alive.”
Lisa Hale, retired police officer, 18-year veteran, Detroit
FROM THE BOOK
"In every photograph, the subject matter says run and the light says stay."
“Danger felt safe. Safety felt dangerous. That was the wiring’s signature malfunction, and in the alleys, I was fearless.”
“I was performing my pain, night after night after night, and the performance became the cure.”
“I’m inside these photographs – walking through the frame, building the image with my hands – yet my technique erases me completely. Only the light remains. I had spent my life perfecting the art of being present and invisible.”
“The toughest alleys I ever entered weren’t in Chicago or Detroit or Brooklyn. They were in my mind, and these pages are what I brought back.”
PRESS RESOURCES
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The complete Alleys & Ruins book in PDF format
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Book overview and publication information
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Short and extended author bios
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Selected curriculum vitae
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High-resolution photographs from the Alleys & Ruins night series
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Book-cover files, author portrait, and behind-the-scenes photograph
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Captions, filenames, and image credits
Finished hardcover review copies available upon request.
For reviews, interviews, podcasts, features, or events:
BIO
Xavier Nuez is a Montreal-born, Chicago-based fine art photographer. His work has been collected and exhibited internationally, including at the Illinois State Museum Chicago, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and the San Diego Art Institute. The son of a Spanish immigrant family, Nuez has spent more than three decades photographing overlooked urban spaces across North America. Alleys & Ruins is his first book.
