Picture Show: Working the Graveyard Shift in Washington, D.C.

After most of us have tucked in our children and crawled into our beds, a small but significant slice of the population ventures into the night to work the graveyard shift. In cities the world over, between dusk and dawn, these night workers ensure that the machinery of society can function smoothly and cleanly. And most of the time, they do so invisibly.

Mark Abramson's series "After Dinner" offers beautiful visions of the people who work while most of us sleep. For Abramson, who by day works as a photojournalist in Washington, D.C., the project of photographing night workers began as an attempt to take pictures in a more solitary setting.

"I was getting tired constantly having other cameras trying to take the same picture as me, so I decided to go out at night, taking pictures of landscapes and simply trying to be alone," he says. "I started to run into folks who were working and I realized that there was this whole culture, this whole shift that works late at night. Night after night they're cleaning, mending, and repairing, and we rarely see their faces."

Mark Abramson's "After Dinner" is an ongoing project. What follows is a selection.

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