From Galerie de Difformite.

Henderson, Gretchen E.

Exhibit L

Let there be (no): lightening, (no) snapshot, (no) quick coordination of aperture and shutter. This is slower. Look through the lens. A figure fixates, focusing. Locks and limbs shiver. Saturating, a girdled bust darkens white. Silvering. Her face tilts; eyes twitch. Blurring. An arm rises to wing. Reflected and inverted, here's the catch: posed ghost. Pictorially washed, her curves float in flight.

[S]ubjects of even the most extreme brightness range must be represented within the limits of the paper, being translated into varying shades of gray, usually with a note of solid black or white, or both, which serves to "key" the tonalities. (1)

Ghost-hunting further: watch shadows shift. Pocks of light shimmer, hover and sheave, leaving a Self-Portrait of Shade. It's a matter of identity, not mistaken but forsaken. Illuminated by varied Opticks, I view from both sides of the glass: "In a very dark Chamber, at a round Hole ... made in the Shut of a Window." Newton thought that "Light is never known to follow crooked Passages," but Grimaldi beheld its ability to bend. (2) So I shadow--

[B]eauty ... must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's ends ... not so much a difference in color as in shade ... (3)

Where she flares: breeching berth. Observing and observed, the camera mirrors her chimera. An art of reversal, negative turns positive. Between exposure and development, "the world turn[s] upside downward," Burton imagines (if "Women we are the Breeches"). (4) Circling: pinpricks in obscuras tempt the "pencil of nature" to render sun writings by sketching, etching, engraving, painting--as artists face brightness attempting not to go blind. (5)

Light can in fact only give way to an image when its path is impeded, when it is turned away from its course. In other words, to be what it is, to be revealed, light must be interrupted.... (6)

And such is the same with shade. Silences shape sound (as after caress, hungering touch): "Someone is going to arise out of the silence," Roubaud rouses the darkened space "where I catch the light by the handful." (7) Suspended at once: remembered and anticipated. Preferring to rove, The camera never lies, but shoots and takes, stealing and sealing--"a secret about a secret"--Arbus wrote, "The more it tells you the less you know." (8) Emulsions trap more than the subjected. Harnessing eye, brain, and hand to make an exposure, a photographer is likewise exposed: choosing to partake in what is "essentially an act of non-intervention." (9)

Is photography the portrait of a concavity, of a lack, of an absence? ... And while that was its physical reality, it descended upon me as though it was its own vision that was deforming.... I hadn't noticed that that woman was an invisible woman. (10)

And where she goes, I go--we go--flying further away from the sun, only to be rendered as light in the negative's frame. Paradoxically. Inverting Icarus, shall I misread this sequence in motion, or be fueled by Muybridge's and Lumiere's stop-times and successions? Light plays tricks on eyes. Like birefringence turns one to two, and refraction bends: a Brockenspekter casts our shadows upon clouds. While it may appear otherwise, I'm your shade, as you're a shade of me. See us for who we are, always accompanying. Shade us further--together--until "the seen, the revealed, is the child of both appearances and the search." (11)

Blurring the most extreme brightness in a very dark Chamber, beauty in shadows render sun writings to be revealed: a secret about a secret--deforming an invisible woman only to be rendered as light.

NOTES

(1.) Ansel Adams, "The Gray Scale," in The Negative: Exposure and Development (New York: Morgan and Lester, 1948), 15.

(2.) Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light (London: Printed for W. Innys, 1730), 21. See also Roy A. Sorensen's Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

(3.) Junichiro Tanizaki, "In Praise of Shadows," in The Art of the Personal Essay, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 346.

(4.) Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol. 1, eds. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55.

(5.) Joseph Nicephore Niepce invented an early photographic engraving process, "heliography" (from the Greek words for "sun" and "writing"), and William Henry Fox Talbot described the camera as the "pencil of nature." See Mary Warner Marien's Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2006), 11, 30.

(6.) Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 93-5. Cadava applies this process to perception: "[P]erception can occur only to the extent that it is interrupted.... To perceive means: not to perceive."

(7.) Jacques Roubaud, "Dialogue," "I'll Turn Away," in Some Things Black, trans. Rosemary Waldrop (Elmwood Park, Ill: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 122, 59.

(8.) Quoted in Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2005), xi.

(9.) Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 11-12.

(10.) Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 23, 30, 33.

(11.) John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 118.