S H Bean ~ Photographer

On Shadows part 3: Form but no texture

By S H Bean on August 6, 2014

As in Plato’s cave the shadow represents the object that creates it, but in the Early Light Project it is given it’s own unique qualities. It has form but unlike the object that created it has no texture and it is the lack of texture that gives the shadow its own plane. There are no clues that tell us about the hidden depths within it’s emptiness. It is normal for the artist to assign planar qualities to objects within the image, but is the shadow flat or does it have depth? It is the one great variable in a seemingly fixed and epistemically stable Landscape. Its ambiguity is a force of attraction.

The shadow is a creative act of a profane object, and it is the visibility of which I concern myself.