The Language of Light
A camera’s lens teaches you how to see without a camera. – Dorothea Lange
Many Junes ago, I gave myself the gift of a photography class at the botanic garden. (Happy birthday fellow Geminis!) Those hours behind the camera’s lens helped me rediscover the joy in learning something new.
It was also a reminder for the writer to take a break from words.
A reprieve is a good thing, but I’m destined not to venture too far from words because so much of what I’ve picked up taking pictures seems to relate back to writing.
All of which compels me to share. In word and image.
Taking photographs has taught me that light is a language. How it emerges through a sleepy eye or a wide-open one sets the stage in differing ways. (Aperature.)
Light is to the photo as words are for the scene.
For the photographer, the nature of the gaze lets in more or less light. (Shutter speed.)A long, studied look (more light) highlights the dimensionality of a subject, like when you can see the tiny hairs on the edges of a cactus.
For the writer, it’s voice. As in the deeply internal world that Jo Ann Beard reveals in her personal essay The Fourth State of Matter.
A quick blink (less light) offers a suggestion or abstraction of a thing. Like this reflection of trees in water.
Or the spare writing of Jean Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
A flood of light illuminates what we might not ordinarily see, like the strands of light coming from the sun. (ISO). Or it may transform it into something completely different.
Like the way Abigail Thomas plays with the shape of the memoir form in Safekeeping, What Comes Next and How to Like It and Still Life at Eighty so that we feel it.
A good photographic composition is a dance between light and view, just as prose works its magic through word choice and voice.
The photographer chooses her focus and lets the rest fade away in order to shine her own light on it. Like Mary Oliver’s poetry.
Learning my camera’s language has taught me that we can find light through the pinhole of dark. But it is also true in the realm of words. I have written my way through many dark times and guided others as they did the same.
I’ve discovered that photography and writing are acts of light seeking. Art making. Expressions of hope.
Photographs by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2024 (For more photo expressions, join me on Instagram.)
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“Taking the Pandemic to the Page” Lighthouse Lit Fest, Single session, online.10 am - noon, June 10, 2024.
“What the Moment Can Hold” Lighthouse Lit Fest. Single session, online. 10 am- noon. June 11, 2024.