Shadow and Darkness (symbols)

[Mark Z]

Night is "darkness" not shadow.

For me, night is shadow - it's the shadow of the Earth. Earth's shadow - Wikipedia

[Uhooru]

Julie said

"Verbally, there can be no sentences without words, no words without sounds. Meaning is not inherent in either the sounds or the words."

 

 

 

 

Yet sound, words and sentences can convey meaning and without meaning, they are not language. Without presence of both light and dark, there is not a photograph.

[Julie H]

Yet sound, words and sentences can convey meaning and without meaning, they are not language. Without presence of both light and dark, there is not a photograph.

 

 

Ignoring the first sentence, which ... LOL ... let's consider the second.

 

I just took a picture of a page in my dictionary. Light and dark. What does that have to do with the symbolism of "shadow" or "darkness"?

 

Without the "presence of both light and dark," there would be no begonias, either. Which might be a good thing. On the other hand, I would miss lima beans. I love lima beans.

 

For me, night is shadow - it's the shadow of the Earth

 

 

In a photograph? Does the sun ever come up in Phil's night picture?

[sjmurray]

From the perspective of the photographer’s eye, shadows define contour, three dimensio nality, etc., and it arises from the directionality of the light. You need light and substance to have contour. We are in constant evaluation of these properties when looking through the lens. I appreciate what you are saying about “darkness,” which is more of a symbolic element: the unknown, mystery, emptiness, “lack of light”, etc. Personally, I am very attuned to contour, but much less interested in the darkness theme. Here’s a portrait that definitely has contour, and maybe a little “darkness” in the background

[Julie H]

You need light and substance to have contour.

 

 

Everything is made of something. Paintings are made of paint. Statues are made of stone. What we see is made of tones and colors. But if I ask ten people on the street what the various pictures posted to this thread, or linked in my second post, are "of" some of them would be "of" what people call "shadow" and many of them would not, even though they obviously contain, and/or are made out of, shadowing and/or have shadows.

 

Your most recent picture, for example, is not "of" anything I would call "shadow." There is a hint of "darkness" that might or might not attract attention via its meaningful connotations.

 

Your chair and curtain pictures, posted earlier, do contain "shadows," but I claim most people would not see them as being "of" or at least "about" anything in particular to do with "shadow." Rather, I see them as being to do with pattern and rhythm, which could just as easily have been rendered, in a black and white photo, via tone that is on the wall or the curtains (gray marking, paint or stain, rather than shadows) without it making any difference to the meaning and effect of the picture.

[sjmurray]

Your most recent picture, for example, is not "of" anything I would call "shadow." said Julie. That's my point. One of the most important qualities of shadow is to define contour, dimensionality. Another is the graphic element as you mention about my chair and curtain photos. Shadow by itself is a relatively obscure theme.

[Julie H]

Shadow by itself is a relatively obscure theme.

 

 

True. And yet you see people slathering black all over their pictures in post. What's with that?

 

Even where "shadow" is used, I find that it's often not used well. For example, this looks like it means something, but I can't think what:

 

John Gutmann The Jump 1939

 

This one, however, I think is really interesting (and unusual) in that rather than shadows making the people, the people are used to make the shadows: harsh, jagged shards of obliterating shadow (purple adjectives used in hopes of provoking people to actually look):

 

Tina Modotti, Workers, Mexico, 1924

[Supriyo]

I think Julie is referring to shadows that have distinct personalities of their own, to have some sort of an independent life. That way, viewers can separate them from any known object and not imagine them as say, a pattern or something that's familiar.

 

It's probably a little easier to make such shadows using organic shapes, like trees and bushes. When I was very young, I used to be scared seeing the shadow created by two tall trees next to our house, which always seemed to me as a monster with two huge legs. It's not that I didn't know they were shadows of trees, but every time I looked at the shadow, I couldn't convince myself that it's a mere shadow, such was it's personality.

[sjmurray]

To me the Modotti image of the workers uses lack of light (darkness) to emphasize the de-personalization of the workers: we cannot see their faces, which would make them "people," "individuals."

 

I guess "distinct personalities" of shadows is another modality.

[Julie H]

I guess "distinct personalities" of shadows is another modality.

 

 

Is there any other kind?

 

(not being a smarty; just thinking ... )

[Julie H]

This:

 

Erwin Blumenfeld, Wet Veil, Paris

 

... is made out of shadows, and acts a lot like a shadow, but it's not a shadow. It's not a "trace" either (such as the shroud of Turin or a hand print), because the woman is there, she's just not visible. Considering this question has given me an enjoyable few hours (I'm doing slow masking) thinking about how clothing, especially fashionable and loose clothing, can do some of the same things as shadows, symbolically.

[Julie H]

I was hoping to have more time this morning to say the following, but I don't so I'll just have to sketch it out. Phil, you're already posting to the same tangent; I love it when that happens ...

 

What I was thinking about was how "darkness" seems to have distinct flavors. If you compare the feel — quality, emanation, call, whatever it is that "darkness" does — of an Atget to that of a Sudek (what I've been thinking of) or a Braeckman (perfect additional example) that Phil has linked, they "work" differently. It's as if you can smell the particular artist in what is ... dark. Context, proportion, whatever; they're using "darkness" in a consistent, recognizable way that is surprisingly distinct, IMO.

[Norman 202]

Dirk Braeckman's blacks and greys of shadow suck out all the surrounding light into the picture. You can just barely breathe in them. Something also to do with the treatment of the almost fur like print surface that absorbs all of the reflected light.

 

Dirk Braeckman

Phil, this is weird. Your description of Braeckman's photos remind me of the Passchendaele mud; mud that sucked life, not light, out of everything, where soldiers suffocated- couldn't breathe- even the texture of the surfaces is similar.

 

(my comparison is not that odd. Braeckman is from Flanders and I had been reading about Passchendaele this week as it is the 100th anniversary of the battle at the end of the month)

Edited July 11, 2017 by Norman 202

[Norman 202]

i'd like to see those but in person.

 

to me, a lot of Braeckman's photos, at least superficially, give off a feeling of serenity and although there is an absence of the light i don't see them as 'dark'.

[Uhooru]

Ignoring the first sentence, which ... LOL ... let's consider the second.

 

I just took a picture of a page in my dictionary. Light and dark. What does that have to do with the symbolism of "shadow" or "darkness"?

 

Without the "presence of both light and dark," there would be no begonias, either. Which might be a good thing. On the other hand, I would miss lima beans. I love lima beans.

Well now your pretty much just being a smart ass and you post is pretty much nonsense and not remotely related to what I'm talking about. LOL. Its all in how you use it. If you want to use shadows in a specific way, that's great and not at all uncommon. I see many photos that are as much or more about shadows or at least the use of them. For instance, its sometimes useful to use shadow, or black as a positive, not negative space. Many surrealist photographers use blacks and deep tones to create their works. BTW your Gutman example is an example of surrealism, something that he was exploring in photography as was/is Ralph Gibson (the somnambulist) etc.

BTW, @ Phil, I like a lot of the photos you used as examples a couple of them very much about darkness/shadow.

[Uhooru]

Shadow as form:

Untitled by Barry Fisher, on Flickr

 

Untitled by Barry Fisher, on Flickr

 

Untitled by Barry Fisher, on Flickr

[Norman 202]

It's as if you can smell the particular artist in what is ... dark. Context, proportion, whatever; they're using "darkness" in a consistent, recognizable way that is surprisingly distinct, IMO.

 

Julie has been watching too much tv*. Try and make time for Philosophy.

 

* Prime Suspect: The Scent of Darkness (TV Movie 1995) - IMDb

Edited July 12, 2017 by Norman 202

[Julie H]

Shadow as form

 

Your pictures are shadow used to make form. Can you not understand the difference between shadow as form and shadow as used to make form?

[On the other hand, the "darkness" in your last two, does fit well into this thread, IMO.]

 

 

Ralph Gibson

 

Ralph Gibson? Did somebody say Ralph Gibson?

 

As a young boy I would sometimes visit my father at work. He was an assistant to Alfred Hitchcock at Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. I vividly recall the high contrast lighting used to expose the ortho-chromatic films then in use. —

Ralph Gibson

 

It has often been remarked that the photographs that most readily capture our imagination conceal almost as much as they reveal and mystify perhaps more than they explicate. As early a practitioner as William Henry Fox Talbot recognized this when he announced his discovery and described photography as "the art of fixing a shadow," for he knew that he had invented a process that recorded not the thing itself, but its reflection, its fleeting and ever-changing shadow. From the very beginning of his career, shadows and mystery have been the subjects of Gibson's art. While he frequently photographs in brilliant light, recording, for example, the way sunlight illuminates an ancient stone, it is often the shadow, with its dense blackness that only grudgingly admits details of texture, time, and place, that most intrigues him. —

Sarah Greenough

 

I once told Dorothea [Lange] that I thought I wanted to be a surrealist photographer. She said, "You can only be yourself, Raphel (her nickname for me), the rest is just a name." —

Ralph Gibson

 

Neither straight nor romantic, not simulated nor journalistic, neither conceptualistic nor luminist, he has successfully evaded classification, settling somewhere between abstraction and realism and, within that band he works his craft, assembling the pieces of visual mosaic often with recurring optical tropes — the gesturing hand, the shadow, the singular eye, geometric configures — and allows us to view them on our own. —

Ray Merritt

 

I don't want to make abstract photographs, but I do want to perceive the abstract in things. I find a great deal of mystery in being alive. —

Ralph Gibson

 

Locus is the surface of the print, the city of origin or a place in the mind. —

Ralph Gibson

 

A phenomenology making darkness visible. The presence of absence. —

Ralph Gibson

[Julie H]

I may be the only one reading this thread who doesn't have TV. Really. None. Zip. I do have a DVD player on which I watch used documentary DVDs.

[Supriyo]

I may be the only one reading this thread who doesn't have TV. Really. None. Zip. I do have a DVD player on which I watch used documentary DVDs.

 

And how do you watch DVDs without a TV ... You meant, you don't have antenna or cable?

[Julie H]

You meant, you don't have antenna or cable?

 

 

You hit the nutshell on the head.

[Uhooru]

Your pictures are shadow used to make form. Can you not understand the difference between shadow as form and shadow as used to make form?

[On the other hand, the "darkness" in your last two, does fit well into this thread, IMO.]

 

Well, we will disagree Julie, What maybe you are not seeing is that, the shadows in the photos create, imply and amplify form, but are also a form in themselves.

[Supriyo]

You hit the nutshell on the head.

 

Feeling so proud of it. :p

[Supriyo]

Supriyo, the lines in one of your shadow pictures made me think of this Spilliaert:

 

http://www.avondlog.nl/sites/live/files/styles/colorbox/public/o8.jpeg

 

Thanks for the example, Phil. I like how the directionality of the spirals is broken by the hair and the long shadow, something thats missing in my photo. I love the hair. Someday, we need to have a thread on hair.

[Norman 202]

#14_18#86#13 schwarzschild — Dirk Braeckman

a remarkable set of photos. thanks very much.