The exhibition of 11 photographs and one poster (culled from a larger collection of more than 60 images) runs through Jan. 18 at the downtown wine boutique Simply Grape.

The images were originally shot for a book that was never published. The collected works have been widely exhibited.

Silver, 61, took the photographs over a 10-year period spanning the 1980s when he was a probation officer in New York City. He was also a single parent to a then-adolescent boy, and, Silver said, he found peace walking the city's streets at night, photographing whatever caught his interest.

"I'm usually drawn to a photo in an innocent way — not didactic or intellectual in any way," Silver said. "My thinking is, 'what I saw was interesting to me and maybe you will find it interesting, too.'

"I like the quality of light in the city at night, when everything is turned upside-down," he said. "I liked to walk at 4 or 5 in the morning, when everything is beautiful and peaceful and quiet."

Some find Silver's "Nightwalks" photographs cinematic, evocative of film noir. Some find then vaguely sinister. Still others find the unpopulated cityscapes sad and lonely.

Silver, who readily acknowledges his work will have different meanings for different viewers, understands his photographs differently.

"Some say they seem lonely but I don't see it that way," he said. "It's about a city made by men, buildings made by men, subway tracks laid by people, and I feel their presence. There were people who walked through the shots (which were set on hours-long exposures) but they weren't there long enough to register. They were there but you can't see them, like ghost figures."

One of the pieces in the collection, a shot of a snow-covered Doyers Street in New York's Chinatown, resulted from mere chance.

"I was coming home from another shoot that wasn't that interesting and I saw this scene," he said. "I asked the cab driver to stop, and I got out and shot it.

"It was taken at 4 a.m., right after the snow fell," he said. "It's a magical moment in New York when everything stops and it's very peaceful. I had an hour or so before the snow started falling again."

While Silver now calls Ho-nolulu home, his ties to New York remain strong.

Silver's parents emigrated from Lithuania and Poland to Brooklyn. With the help of an aunt, they bought and operated a candy shop in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They lived in a small apartment in back of the shop, one of just a couple of white families in the predominantly black neighborhood.

When Silver was 5, the family moved to a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Queens.

A mediocre student, Silver "squeezed by" in public high school and attended New York University, where he majored in philosophy, then Spanish literature, and later (after taking a year off to work a series of menial jobs) early European history and filmmaking.

It was as a cameraman working on anti-Vietnam War documentaries that Silver refined his eye for color, light and composition.

A year after graduation, Silver was drafted by the Army and sent to Korea, where he worked as a clerk a few miles from the DMZ. While there, Silver met and got engaged to his future wife, Shinjae. They married shortly after Silver returned to New York and had a son, Jacob. The marriage lasted just three years, and when it was over, Silver retained custody of Jacob.

It was Jacob who first drew Silver's attention to Hawai'i, when the son landed a job as a sous chef at Michel's in 1998. Jacob left Hawai'i a year and a half later but returned after 9/11. Silver, who admits he had "no interest in tropical or warm places," followed to help his son with the adjustment.

Silver stayed for two years before homesickness prompted him to return to New York. Despite a productive year of photography there, Silver began to feel homesick again. But how?

"I realized then that Honolulu had become my home," he said. He moved back to Hawai'i for good last June.

Less than two years ago, Silver did a series of color photographs capturing Honolulu's urban landscapes. As he was in New York, Silver found himself drawn to older buildings and structures.

"There's a '50s feel to a lot of structures in Honolulu," he said. "There a delicate quality to them that is being lost so people can put up more monstrous condominiums.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.