Me and my shadow (the return fixture) July 11, 2007

We learn that since time immemorial people have been noticing the effect of light on a surface. In a sense then photography was borne at the moment we first opened our eyes.

I always say when people start going on about photographic technique that it is all about light – you need light. Then you need the eye and then you need a box to capture it in.

I am sure that someone, well before ‘the inventor’ Schultz in 1724, had also looked upon a surface and noticed how it actually changed in composition and intensity – one only has to see how dirt darkens when rained upon. Schultz saw how the light actually changed something permanently, just as it can fade things left in a window.

My daughter, one and a half, has suddenly developed this thing about shadows. She was walking from the campsite to the Festival site – her first festival – her first time in the company of loads of people, when she suddenly stopped and kept pointing to something by her foot. It was the shadow of her foot.
She is since scared of the shadow that seemingly clings to her feet and echoes her move and can’t be shrugged off (a safe place might be in the Lake District as the cloud is sure to come across very soon and kill the harsh shadow).

Ava! is discovering something about her and the world beyond her. I have been reading up about shadows, because just as she was getting scared about them, I was having fun photographing them as a way of avoiding the detail of particular peoples faces.

But mostly I got into photography not to create silhouettes and shadows and blind spots, but to give detail to peoples faces and conditions, to throw light into the darkness, just as Lowry, a hero, denied photographic detail in his brushstrokes.

Photography is said to give a mirror-image of the subject.

In Japanese mythology, the mirror is significant. It is said to be the soul of a woman as a sword is to a samurai. A proverb says, “When the mirror is dim, the soul is unclean.” When the heart is free of evil thought and is clear, the mirror will reflect the purity of the soul. It’s like a conscience.

An ancient belief stated people or objects could be connected to their reflections. Put simply, when we look in the mirror (camera) we learn something about ourself. The mirror as with the camera can be our conscience.

The Japanese more than anyone, with their super-quality lenses and cameras have pushed the notion of the mirror-image to its limit.

The obsession of truth and beauty by a mirror’s reflection shows up in stories like Snow White and Narcissus… in some stories, the other side of the mirror gives the counter of a person, as the mirror reverses a reflection so figuratively the mirror can reverse a personality. Again, the camera can see through a subject to reveal a hidden truth and not the obvious truth of first sight. Certainly some photographs and perhaps these are portraits of people like the Richard Avedon series – you want to keep on looking at and you seem to be drawn into and even through the picture/face.

Just as it was an ancient belief that mirrors trapped a person’s soul, cameras do that today and it is often said of Arab peoples that they don’t like having their photograph ‘taken’ as if it steals something from them.

I like the way the photograph can capture the spirit of the place and the spirit of the moment – even a moment long gone. Imagination takes over. Tomorrow I return to the Glastonbury site where seemingly all of humanity waded in mud three weeks ago around the summer solstice and where I photographed certain people. They have recounted their stories to me since of how they came to be there and although they were complete strangers when I stopped them or bumped into them, these meetings and the subsequent photographs taken (the capturing of their souls) are to me legendary the very spots on which each was taken are ‘sacred’.

This is how people must feel when visiting Nazareth and viewing the place where Jesus was supposed to have been borne. And visiting Belsen to imagine where was the very spot where Ann Frank might have finally died and to imagine what was the final thought of the dying Ann, robbed of her power to pen. And battlegrounds must be like that for many, particularly relatives.

I return to Glastonbury with great hope – no one died here, it was humanity smiling smiling smiling through the miles and miles and miles and miles of mud – smiling, saying ‘we have come a long way that we can do this, we are along some path, this is out of the ordinary, we are connected at this time and place…
Learned people may talk about Shamens and ‘the healing’ and the Soul but in more simple terms I think they are referring to this Glastonbury shadow.

One day when she is older I will take Ava! back to that other festival, Cornbury, and stand her in the exact same place at where she first saw her shadow.

Indeed, I may make it a place of pilgrimage for the two of us.