I’m thinking about light because it struck me the other day how I seem to be turning more and more towards words as my mood has darkened, less able or willing or interested in reaching for my camera as well.
It’s like my field of vision has narrowed along with the aperture of my heart, my eyes fixated on a single point directly in front of me.
Making an effort to look around me has been an exercise in self-care. I’ve been seeking out the light; the camera helps with that. Despite everything the world might be saying right now, I am a child of light, and so are you.
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“Are you a Bolshevik?”
“No, I’m a lomographer,” I replied.
That’s the sort of inscrutable silliness I enjoy; putting together stuff I already own like a curatorial happening that only I’m invited to. A walking talking inside joke, except dead serious.
There’s an arc to lomography’s genesis as a movement to salvage what remained of democratized art and its apotheosis as a global luxury brand, and it’s an arc that runs parallel to the process that all signifiers take when they detach from their referents and take on lives of their own. It’s the arc that many of our political symbols and symbolic languages take even as they continue to circulate, losing more and more of their currency with every news cycle.
So, what am I this Halloween? I am meaning unmoored, the truest horror that sends shivers down my spines.
I’ve been thinking about light. The children of light. The quality of light. How to write with light on reams of darkness. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that light and illumination are not synonymous, though many photographers may think the terms interchangeable.
That’s why they say that the Pacific Northwest has “”great light,”” which struck me as counterintuitive when I first read that in Fred Moody’s memoir, of all places. Seattle the forever-grey has great light? Apparently, yes. The great Maker has blessed creatives with a giant diffuser in the heavens, casting down an even light on all car commercials.
But having attuned my vision to this more ambient eye for the technical guy, I’ve now come back around to a second naiveté. Truth be told, that is not what most people mean when they talk about light.
When we are despairing, we don’t seek out the flattest backlit tableaux – we look for a light that makes itself known, that breaks through and actively participates in the scene. We look for warm pockets of sunshine amongst the shadows. And, in that sense, Seattle doesn’t always have great light. The lomographers among us would understand.