Shadows
This post is not about light
How does one attack the mass craving for about-ness? In conversation, drafting syllabi, writing emails, navigating the ticking time-bomb of apps, one is confronted with the ubiquitous Subject-Line. What is this about? Do you want to see more like this - on shoes, on books, on love, on dytopias? Luckily most great art confounds that question. A question I increasingly find tyrannical. This question is also simultaneously the dummy version of the other question - if I don’t get it, it must be wrong? Take it off the plate of public visibility or discourse because I don’t get it. What is it even about? The answer to the question “what is Picasso’s Guernica about” is obviously that it is about war and its associated destruction. What do we even do to the viewing experience of Picasso’s art by asking that question. Unfortunately, the world we live in, wants an executive summary first.
This rant is a mid-level entrypoint into the question of shadows. Shadows refute the about question. What are shadows about? The dumb answer to that question is obviously the play of light. But this post, as I have assured you, is not about light. The absence of light excites me tremendously. Absence of light meaning where light has just left the room - but it is not dark. But you can’t really say there is light. You could perhaps say there was light here, meaning light has now gone elsewhere. I try to photograph shadows obsessively, albeit with least success. Shadows are ephemeral. They move out of focus without announcing their intention first. They are delicate. They break and dissolve at the slightest invasion of light. Their shapes are unstable, their size though, infinite.
In the courtyards of Vrindavan, especially on hot afternoons, shadows come down to talk to each other. They mill about, feeling somewhat secure, comfortable. The harsh afternoon trickles through the cracks of windows and heavily carved wooden doors. The precarious baazaar of shadows inaugurates itself as the world around them goes to rest briefly.
I find, in reading texts, there are shadows of the author’s actual conversation with the reader that hides behind the lines printed in think black ink of ant-like letters. Something else is going on between authors and readers that needs the veneer of text to actually play out its own drama. The drama of shadows.
Light comes in as a necessary facade for the black market of shadows to enact itself.
Let me leave you here with some of my shadowy attempts at photography.
.All photographs are taken by me and their copyright remains with me.