How In Praise of Shadows made me look at my photographs differently

I came across Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows almost by accident. I started it without expectation. By the last page I opened the archive. Tanizaki notices beauty in what modernity tries to clear away: shadow, muted colour, aged surface, the patina of time, the quiet of what is not fully shown.

The pixels had not changed. I had.

Before clocks, people read shadows. Length told the hour; direction told where you stood. Later we built instruments around that reading. A shadow became a clock. A shadow became a compass. It was information.

Now a screen gives the minute and a satellite gives the metre. We hardly need the ground. Perhaps that is why the book caught. It sent me back to the shadow not as missing light, but as a reading.

1. The Tea Tree Girl Kaziranga, 2015

Under the canopy at Kaziranga I picked up a fallen tea-tree branch. To the forest it was decaying wood. To me it was a girl, arms out, stopped mid-turn. I brought her home. For eleven years she stood in the house and threw nothing.

Yesterday I set her against a blank wall. The light gave her a second body. The shadow crossed the plaster, longer than the branch, one arm higher than the wood that cast it. For eleven years I had seen the girl. Yesterday the wall held the other one.

2. The Circle of Light Thimphu, 19 September 2017

In the archive, a frame from Thimphu: not the sun itself, but the shape it cut among the branches. The darker limbs made an irregular frame. They do not quite close.

At the time I photographed what was there. The disc is arresting only because of what surrounds it. Without that canopy it would bleed into sky and lose its edge. The shadow is not competing with the light. It is holding it.

3. The Moon and the Mountains Tiger Nest, Bhutan, 22 September 2017, 9:30 p.m.

Three days later the mountains had almost gone into the night. Then the moon rose, and the ridge took its lower horn. I pressed the shutter.

I was not photographing the moon. I was photographing what it allowed. The mountains stay concealed; only the jagged line comes off the dim sky. Some landscapes reveal themselves by disappearing. The dark does not hide them completely. It gives just enough to imagine their weight.

4. My Own Absence Namdapha, 20 November 2018, 12:32 p.m.

On a trek through Namdapha I looked down: fallen leaves, old roots, soil, and my silhouette across them. I am not in the picture. I am in it. No face, no clothes, and still a record of presence. I had photographed my own absence.

A shadow does not exist in total dark. It needs light. Mine existed at 12:32 p.m. because I stood between the sun and the earth. The light made the evidence.

5. The Fifteen-Year-Old Thar Last Friday, 6:00 p.m.

Then the Thar, parked beside a shop on an ordinary urban evening. Traffic, neon, people hurrying. Reflections streaked that street across the glass. The vehicle did not take the hurry. Fifteen years of journeys, monsoon, dust, memory, and the machine still. That patina is another shadow — the shadow of time.

The branch is still the deadwood from Kaziranga. The mountains at Tiger Nest have not moved. The Namdapha soil is where it was. The Thar is still fifteen. The light and the shadows were already there when the shutter clicked.

I thought I was revisiting the archive. I was revisiting myself.

Tanizaki did not teach me how to photograph shadows. He taught me to listen to what they had been whispering. Any book can give information. A masterpiece changes attention. Sometimes the proof that you have changed is to look at something familiar and find it unfamiliar. A good book does not change the photograph. It changes the eyes that look at it.