What is the use of the shadow of anything if there be no substance to it? Let nature imitate what nature made. A phrase that appears again and again in the earliest days of photography: to fix the shadows. Humankind's desire to grasp images of light and dark and hold them, fix them into some tangible form and keep them from slipping away. A sealed room, the sun painting the world through the eye of a needle like a tarot card reversed. A woman crying for her dead lover as a candleflame paints his shadow to the wall like the last remnant of his soul. Silver nitrate is what fixes those ethereal materials. Photography transforms precious metals into paper images; as an optical registration of light and shadow, photographic negatives turn white into black and black into white. |