Photographing l'Inquiétante Étrange

I used to be afraid of the sun, of it’s harshness. It felt violent in my photos and unforgiving. Yet, in art as in photography the images I’m drawn to have always been those marked by hard contrasts and deep shadows.

The Italian artist Caravaggio called light an “instrument of spirituality" and used it to bring out the sublime and the mystical in tableaus of what would have otherwise been banal, everyday scenes. As I look at his paintings I wonder if it is the element of the unknown that makes this clair-obscur so striking. The light calls our attention to the subject, but the deep shadow leaves room for interpretation, for imagination, for mystery. 

Perhaps, in life, it is during these same moments of stark light that the ordinary can suddenly become extraordinary: a stranger’s silhouette illuminated against the window of a moving train; the curve of a lover’s profile rendered unfamiliar by a street lamp at midnight; the quiet perfection of a bowl of figs lying half in, half out of a ray of sun lazily stretching across the table on a late summer evening; even a surprise glimpse of our own body in dim hotel room as it’s thrown into contrast by the opening of a bathroom door. 

The peculiar appeal of these occurrences is somewhat difficult to quantify. But I’m immediately reminded of how Freud describes the uncanny (Unheimlich), or instances when the familiar becomes suddenly strange. Like the light/dark of chiaroscuro, the duality of known/unknown evokes a sense of the clandestine, of secrecy, of something emerging from the shadows of our subconscious. We are drawn to the ambiguity, intrigued by this the play between imaginary and real, between presence and absence, just as we are drawn to the works of art that capture it.

Fittingly, it was a stranger who first revealed to me the change in my relationship with light. As I look back on my photography I see that I now lean into that which I once avoided. Still, I wonder if this natural gravitation was perhaps not due to an interest in the light itself, but for what lies unrevealed in the shadow it casts. Photography is light, in fact. Camera obscura: through a pin-hole a world revealed upside-down. But, because of this, it is also the opposite. It occurs to me that perhaps within this « entre-deux » I find a form of freedom, a space where the mind can wander, a place where I can meet myself in the dark…

Walls and Windows [the spaces between]

Last night at 8pm, like every 8pm since the confinement, we went to the window and clapped. Sometimes it’s rowdy, sometimes there are cheers, sometimes a person down the street plays along on the trumpet and makes us all laugh. This time there was nothing immediately extraordinary, the trash collectors had already passed so they didn’t honk us into an encore. The trumpeter was quiet, nobody hollered or yelled. 8:01, rhythmic, steady. 8:02, it seemed like it would stop but it didn’t. Seconds ticked by. Strange, I thought, to keep going, but I did. 8:03, the moment felt solemn somehow. I realized we were still clapping because we weren’t ready to move away from one another. Stranger’s silhouettes staggered in their windows held us captive, a collective comfort in the movement of our hands, leaning out into this shared space in the middle of all these walls.

Finally, it came to an end. Hands began to lower, cigarettes were lit, someone turned on music and curtains started to close as one by one people disappeared back inside, calling “bonne soirée!” and “à demain!” I wondered if they too were struck by the weight of these typically unremarkable words. The greater context and this particular night -- just a few hours after Paris’ confinement had been extended -- seemed to lend them a strange gravity. And yet I somehow felt reassured. Yes, we’ll all be here tomorrow, for another 15 days or more, in this act we’ve named “distancing,” miraculously more with each other than ever before.⠀