Restoration Obscura’s
Field Guide to the Night
By John Bulmer, Historian, Photographer, Creator of Restoration Obscura
A hauntingly beautiful journey through history, culture, and memory, Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night reveals how darkness shaped us—and what we lose when we erase it.
Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night is a journey into the forgotten histories, mythologies, and meanings of darkness. From wartime blackouts and Cold War surveillance towers to ancient skywatchers and vanished starlight, this immersive exploration blends storytelling, scholarship, and memoir to reveal how night has shaped human survival, imagination, and resilience.
Author, photographer, and historian John Bulmer invites readers to step out of the glow and into the shadows, where silence becomes signal and memory lives in static. Drawing from personal experience, historical record, and cultural analysis, this field guide traces the many roles night has played—from fear to wonder, from concealment to clarity.
Whether you’ve stood under a clear Milky Way sky or never truly seen darkness, this book will change how you see the world after sundown.
John Bulmer is a writer, historian, and award-winning photographer based in New York's Capital Region. Through his multi-platform project Restoration Obscura, he explores forgotten histories, Cold War surveillance, wartime memory, lost neighborhoods, and the cultural cost of light pollution. His documentary-style work blends narrative journalism, personal storytelling, and visual restoration to reconnect audiences with obscured pasts and overlooked truths. He is the author of Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night and host of the companion podcast. By day, he works in public communications; by night, he documents the stories hidden just beyond the glow.
About Restoration Obscura
Restoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another shot at being seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the forgotten chapters—the ones buried in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.
The name nods to the camera obscura, an early photographic device that captured light in a darkened chamber. Restoration Obscura flips that idea, pulling stories out of darkness and casting light on what history left behind.
This project uncovers what textbooks miss: Cold War secrets, vanished neighborhoods, wartime experiments, strange ruins, lost towns, and the people tied to them. Each episode, article, or image rebuilds a fractured past and brings it back into focus, one story at a time.
If you believe memory is worth preserving, if you’ve ever felt something standing at the edge of a ruin or holding an old photograph, this space is for you.
Subscribe to support independent, reader-funded storytelling: www.restorationobscura.com
The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is streaming now on all major streaming platforms.
Contact
© 2025 John Bulmer Media. Restoration Obscura and all related content are the intellectual property of John Bulmer. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission, except for brief quotations used in reviews, articles, or educational contexts.
We were never meant to live without night. We were meant to remember it.
Reserve your copy today.
Amazon Author Page
Publisher : Restoration Obscura Press
Publication date : June 1, 2025
Language : English
Print length : 368 pages
ISBN: 979-8218702731
Amazon Prime
Print: $14.99 | Kindle: $9.99