The Shadow of Light

“One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.” (Gibran)  

 

Sometime things happen by chance, without a precise will, as if by play.  

In a fun and very interesting book on the importance of error in art and photography, Erik Kessels suggests that we must rethink our imagination: “Because if you know how to go beyond the usual or proper uses of things, nothing can stop your creativity anymore.”  

It's with this mental state that I recently catch myself staring at some of my photographs on the computer screen, in particular a lily, trying – in fact – to rethink it.  

It was a moment, like a flash, that the finger pressed the function of “inverting” the image, sending it to the negative; and here the lily before my eyes has become something else, still itself but reversing its essence of lights and colors.  

 

A fascinating game into which I got lost these days. Yes, turning the world upside down: making the light dark and flooding the light with darkness.

This is the negative in photography, the physical reversal of chiaroscuro and colors, where color gives way to its complement, just as light is the inverted glove of darkness.

 

It seems that everything was born on the shores of Lake Como, in 1833, when William Henry Fox Talbot brought his fresh bride Constance Mundy on a honeymoon to Italy, and enchanted in front of the beauty of the lake and from his wife's drawings he thought and wrote:

“How fascinating it would be if it were possible to make these natural images impress themselves and in a lasting way, and remain fixed on paper... and so that the idea does not escape me yet... I have carefully taken note of it... together with the experiments that I thought were most useful for its realization, if possible.”

The history of the invention of photography was the result of the work of five personalities: Thomas Wedgwood in England, Joseph Niépce and Daguerre in France (to whom the invention was officially recognized as a patent, subtracting the co-merit from Niépce who in the meantime was dead) and Fox Talbot who devoted himself to the study of the “negative” and “positive”, a term coined by the fifth soul of this art, Sir John Herschel, after the official launch of the first daguerreotype in 1837 – the term “photography” is also attributed to him intended as writing with light.

This was Talbot's desire, observing his wife's drawings and the enchanted beauty of the landscape: “How fascinating it would be if it were possible to make these natural images impress themselves and in a lasting way...”

And so it was, for various attempts, because the problem of the daguerreotype is that it was not duplicable.

“Talbot used letter paper dipped in a diluted sodium chloride solution (normal cooking salt) which dried and then treated with a denser solution of silver nitrate: in this way silver chloride remained in the pores of the paper. Then he placed a leaf, a feather and a lace cutout on it and exposed it to sunlight. The paper blackened, while the covered part remained white forming the exact but inverted reproduction of the objects.” (Michael Gray)

 

Fox Talbot. “Photogenic drawing of a fern” (1839)

Fox Talbot. Talbot's daughters. Negative calotype (left) made by a Berard daguerreotype (right)

This procedure is called “sciagrafia” or “sciadografia” (from the Greek skia – ombra, shadow, in English), in which the first drawing on the transparent paper could be used to produce a second drawing and so on, in which the light and the shadow were reversed: the “positive”, exactly – the real image.

In 1840, when he saw the image reproduced on a white sheet appear for the first time, he called this “calotipo”, from kalos, “beautiful” in Greek.

The importance of words.

The dream of being able to write and draw with light, so that it could be duplicated and lasting, had to go through its opposite: the shadow, the skia.

From writing with shadows we come to beauty, to light, which finally brings us back to what our eyes see in reality, as in a sort of reinterpretation of Plato's Cave Myth.

 

But then, is this also so certain?

Are we sure that what we see is reality? Or, as it is said in philosophy, we are staring in front of the Veil of Maya which hides the true essence of things.

After all, the light of the stars in the night is only the remote halo of stars that died thousands of years ago, and the red or green of the objects we observe and touch is actually the only color of the chromatic spectrum that the surface of those objects reflects to our eyes, and therefore it's the only color that does not constitute them. All the colors of our existence are false, they are also illusions, they are segments of the electromagnetic spectrum rejected by objects to our brain that re-elaborates them.

 

 

For this reason I feel a profound and disturbing pleasure in observing these photo experiments; and I offer them to you, without any comment or caption.

Because they are not another reality or a hallucination, but the root of the tree that cannot be seen, the writing with the shadows that overturns our vision.

Moreover, something more important for me, because they remind us once again of a fundamental truth of our life: light derives and feeds on darkness as darkness does with light, they are complementary and indissoluble; and these photos, as well as the negatives of our old forgotten photographs in the drawers, are tangible proof of this.

Skia and Foto, shadow and light, are two sides of a single element, two angles of a single reality.

And, this is as true for the world outside of us as it is for humans and their souls.

 

Erik Kessels: “Che sbaglio! What a mistake!” (Phaidon, 2016)
“Fox Talbot” edited by Michael Gray (Motta Photography, 1998)

Italian version