Dark Light


  • Photographer
    Andrea Rosenthal
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2012-2013
  • Technical Info
    Leica M9 and archival pigment

This series is my response to losing five dear friends in a short period of time. I photographed light as it illuminated everyday objects inside my home as a metaphor for my absent friends.

Story

In this series, I’ve been exploring light in response to the loss of five dear friends, photographing early morning and late afternoon light as it came through the windows of my home and touched everyday objects. In the process, light became as much about memory and grief as what it illuminated.

Dark Light struggles with the commonalities of life that grief both highlights and subsumes, turns into endless meaningless repetitions, and places into keen, almost painful focus. I utilize the power of the camera to see and capture light as it appears; both very much of this world and yet, not. The works alternate between abstraction and realism and make use of repetition and patterns, as in Hall of Frames, presenting us with a world both endless and foreign, until awareness dawns of what otherwise exists only as a series of repetitive vertical lines, melting into the background.

Light, as both grief and its salve, is the emotional and compositional conduit of these works. Like grief, light finds its way into every recess, showing us parts of our lives that we thought were safe from its pain. At the same time, light represents the healing process, the way through which acute pain eventually subsides and transforms itself into a warm memory of loved ones lost.

Dark Light is an evocation of the healing power of light; it documents the healing process by tracing its evolution written across the face of the everyday.


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