Reflection — In Praise of Shadows

Reading Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows has come at an interesting moment in the development of my photographic practice. Recently I have been thinking increasingly about light: how I light an object, how much light is necessary, where it should fall, and, perhaps more importantly, where it should not fall. Until quite recently I tended to regard shadow as something of an enemy in photography—a technical problem that needed to be controlled or eliminated. My instinct was to illuminate the scene sufficiently so that the objects were clearly described. Yet my recent still-life photographs have begun to challenge this assumption.

Tanizaki offers another way of thinking about darkness. In In Praise of Shadows, shadow is not understood as the absence of something. It has its own presence. Objects acquire beauty precisely because they are not completely revealed. A lacquered surface emerging from a darkened room, the faint reflection of gold, or an object sitting within the recess of an alcove becomes more compelling because our vision cannot immediately possess it. We have to look into the darkness and allow the object gradually to reveal itself.

This idea seems particularly important to what I am trying to achieve in my current work. I am becoming less interested in photographing objects simply as objects and more interested in constructing an environment in which objects exist in relationship to one another. The photograph becomes a psychological and emotional space rather than simply a description of a still life. Light can reveal certain things while shadow withholds others. What is withheld may become as significant as what is shown.

This changes my understanding of photographic lighting. Rather than asking, How do I illuminate the composition?, I can ask, What needs to emerge from the darkness? These are fundamentally different questions. The first treats darkness as a technical deficiency; the second treats darkness as part of the visual language of the photograph.

There is something particularly compelling about Tanizaki’s idea of partial visibility. When everything in an image is evenly illuminated, everything is immediately available to the viewer. There is little need for the eye to search. Shadow, however, introduces uncertainty. It slows down the act of looking. An object may initially appear as a shape or tonal mass before its material identity becomes apparent. Texture may emerge gradually. A reflection may draw attention to one small part of an otherwise dark object. The viewer has to participate in constructing the image.

This also helps me understand why I have responded so strongly to the shadows in my recent photographs. I had initially thought that the success of these images might simply be a consequence of more natural-looking light. I now think there is something more significant occurring. The shadows establish relationships between the objects and the space they inhabit. They give the objects weight. They locate them on the surface. They create distance and intimacy. Most importantly, they introduce areas of uncertainty into an image that might otherwise become overly descriptive.

My recent interest in Giorgio Morandi becomes particularly relevant here. Morandi’s shadows are often extremely quiet. They do not announce themselves dramatically, yet without them the bottles, jars and vessels would lose much of their spatial and emotional presence. Margaret Olley’s interiors and still lifes operate differently—they are more abundant, colourful and accumulative—but here too objects exist within an atmosphere. They belong to a lived environment rather than appearing as isolated specimens.

Tanizaki introduces another possibility: that darkness itself can become part of that atmosphere. Taken together, these influences suggest a movement in my practice away from lighting objects and toward constructing light.

This distinction may also explain my growing interest in making the photographs more painterly. Painting does not necessarily have to account for every piece of visual information equally. The painter can suppress, exaggerate, obscure or dissolve. Photography, because of its descriptive capacity, can easily tempt me toward showing too much. Increasingly, I want to resist that tendency. Selective lighting provides one means of doing so. Darkness can simplify the photograph, allowing some objects to recede while others emerge.

The man’s handkerchief that has appeared in the recent compositions is particularly interesting in this respect. Its folds catch light selectively. Some parts become almost luminous while others disappear into shadow. The cloth therefore becomes something more than an object placed within the still life. Its folds create a small landscape of illumination and darkness. It can connect otherwise separate objects, interrupt the surface on which they sit, and introduce softness and vulnerability against the harder surfaces of glass, ceramic and other objects.

There is also an emotional dimension to this. My work increasingly concerns the emotional and psychological landscapes that exist beneath ordinary experience. Tanizaki’s shadows offer a visual metaphor for this idea. Human relationships and memories are never completely illuminated. We remember fragments. Certain things become extraordinarily vivid while others disappear. Some things remain present precisely through their absence. Shadow therefore has the potential to operate not merely formally but psychologically.

This suggests an important direction for the next stage of my photographic experiments. Rather than adding lights simply to achieve greater control or more even illumination, I can use them to create greater selectivity. A small light directed toward one vase, a faint reflection across glass, illumination catching the edge of the handkerchief, or an object allowed almost to disappear into the background may be more powerful than illuminating the entire arrangement.

The lesson I take from Tanizaki is therefore not that my photographs should simply become darker. It is subtler than that. I need to become more conscious of the relationship between revelation and concealment.

Light tells the viewer where to look.

Shadow gives the viewer somewhere to search.

Perhaps the most important development in my thinking is that I no longer need to regard these as opposites. Light and shadow depend upon one another. The illuminated object becomes meaningful partly because of the darkness surrounding it. The shadow becomes perceptible because something nearby has caught the light.

I am beginning to see that my task is not to eliminate the shadows from my photographs, but to decide which shadows the photograph needs.