Negative Space

The Weight of Light

Chapter 14: Negative Space

The concept has two names. In visual arts, it is called negative space -- the space around and between the subject of a photograph, the empty areas, the blank zones, the parts of the frame that contain nothing, or seem to contain nothing, but that in fact contain the shape of the subject's absence, the outline of the thing that is not there, the way a hole in a wall contains the shape of the brick that was removed. In music, the same concept is called rest -- the silence between notes, the pause between phrases, the nothing that gives the something its rhythm, its shape, its meaning. In architecture, it is called void -- the empty space within a structure that defines the structure, the atrium, the courtyard, the room that is not filled, the space that breathes.

Elena preferred the photographic term. Negative space. The name itself contained the paradox: space that is negative, that is defined by what it is not, that exists only in relation to the positive space it surrounds. Negative space is the silence that gives the note its shape. Negative space is the dark that gives the light its edge. Negative space is the empty chair that gives the occupied chair its meaning.

"Look at the ceiling," Elena said.

The students looked up.

"What is on the ceiling?"

"Nothing," someone said. "Tiles. Fluorescent lights."

"The ceiling is negative space," Elena said. "In the composition of this room, the ceiling is the empty area above the positive space of your bodies, the desks, the equipment. If I were to photograph this room from the doorway, the ceiling would occupy the upper third of the frame, and it would be empty -- white tiles, fluorescent fixtures, nothing else -- and you might think that the ceiling is wasted space, that the photograph would be better if I tilted down and filled the frame with the interesting things, the people, the desks, the objects. But you would be wrong. The ceiling is what gives the room its height. The ceiling is what creates the sense of volume, of air, of space above the human activity below. Without the ceiling in the frame, the room would feel compressed, airless, crowded. The negative space of the ceiling is what allows the positive space of the room to breathe."

She moved to the whiteboard. She drew, roughly, by feel, a rectangle, and within the rectangle she drew a smaller shape -- a circle, or an approximation of one -- in the lower right corner.

"This is a composition," she said. "A circle in the lower right of the frame. The circle is the subject. The positive space. Everything else -- the rectangle surrounding the circle -- is negative space. Now look at the negative space. Do not look at the circle. Look at everything that is not the circle. What shape is it?"

She waited.

"It is an irregular shape," she said. "It is the shape of the rectangle minus the circle. It is the shape of the absence. And this shape -- this negative shape -- is as important as the circle, is as much a part of the composition as the subject, because the negative space is what positions the subject, what gives it weight, what tells the eye where the subject is in relation to the edges of the frame. A circle in the lower right corner creates a large negative space in the upper left, and that large empty space has visual weight, has gravitational pull, and the pull creates tension between the empty and the full, between the occupied and the unoccupied, and the tension is the composition."

She set the marker down.

"Edward Weston," she said. "The great American photographer. He made photographs of peppers and shells and nudes and sand dunes, and in every photograph, the negative space is as carefully composed as the subject. His pepper photographs -- green peppers, ordinary vegetables, photographed in such a way that they become sculptural, monumental, the folds and curves of the pepper rendered with the attention that Michelangelo gave to the human body -- in those photographs, the black background is not nothing. The black background is the negative space that defines the pepper. The black is what makes the pepper visible. Without the black, the pepper would be lost in context, would be a vegetable on a counter, a thing among things. With the black, the pepper is isolated, is singular, is revealed, and the revelation is accomplished not by the subject but by the space around the subject, by the emptiness that says: look here, look at this, nothing else exists, only this, only this pepper, only this shape, only this light on this surface."

She returned to the desk. She sat on its edge.

"I live in negative space," she said. "My life is defined by what is not in it. Sight is not in it. My career as a photographer is not in it. The ability to look at my own work, at my own face, at the faces of the people I love -- these are not in it. And the absence of these things -- the negative space of my life -- defines the positive space that remains. The teaching. The listening. The knowing. The memory of what I saw when I could see. The shape of my life now is the shape that remains when you subtract sight from a photographer, and the shape is strange, is unexpected, is not the shape I would have designed, but it is a shape, it is defined, it has edges and contours and an interior, and the interior is not empty even though it is defined by emptiness."

She paused. She could feel the room holding its breath, the way a room holds its breath when the person speaking has crossed from the professional into the personal, from the lecture into the confession, from the safe territory of Weston's peppers into the dangerous territory of the lecturer's own loss.

"I am not asking for pity," she said, and her voice was firm, was the voice that foreclosed pity, that shut the door on sympathy and opened the door on understanding, because understanding was harder than sympathy and more useful and more respectful. "I am using myself as an example because I am the example that is available. Negative space. The space around the subject. The space that defines the subject by surrounding it with nothing. My blindness is the negative space around my teaching. My blindness is the emptiness that defines the fullness. And I want you to think about this when you compose your photographs, when you decide what to include and what to exclude, because the excluded space -- the negative space -- is not nothing. It is the shape of your decisions. It is the outline of your seeing. It is the contour of your attention, rendered in emptiness."

She assigned the work: photograph a subject in which the negative space is the primary visual element. Photograph something surrounded by nothing. Photograph the nothing as carefully as you would photograph the something. She dismissed the class.

The students left. Most of them. Deb Whitfield remained.

Elena could hear her remaining. She could hear the particular silence of a person who has not moved, who has not gathered her things, who has not stood from her desk and joined the flow of bodies toward the door. She could hear Deb's breathing, which was steady but deliberate, the breathing of a person who is deciding whether to speak, who is assembling the words in advance, testing them silently before releasing them into the air.

"Deb," Elena said. "You're still here."

"Do you have a minute?"

"I have several minutes. Come sit."

She heard Deb rise and walk to the front of the room, heard the footsteps -- Deb wore flat shoes, rubber-soled, the kind of shoes that a woman wears when she has decided that comfort matters more than appearance, the kind of shoes that are themselves a form of negative space, the absence of the heels and the straps and the discomfort that she had worn for twenty-eight years of marriage, the absence of the performance -- and she heard Deb sit in the chair beside the desk, the chair that was usually empty, that was usually negative space, and Deb occupied it.

"I wanted to talk about the table," Deb said.

"The dining room table."

"Yes. The dining room table. I've been photographing it for eight weeks now. Every day. Sometimes twice a day. Different light. Different time. Different angle. I have hundreds of photographs of this table. And I know what you would say -- you would say I am not photographing the table, I am photographing the absence, the missing chairs, the empty spaces. And you're right. But I wanted to -- I wanted to tell you something about the table. About why I keep going back to it."

"Tell me," Elena said.

Deb was quiet for a moment. In the quiet, Elena could hear the building around them -- the hum of the HVAC system, the distant sound of a class in the room next door, Janet Fong's voice, muffled through the wall, lecturing on something, probably studio lighting, probably the controlled, intentional, measured allocation of photons that was the opposite of the available light Elena taught, and the distance between the two approaches was the distance between control and surrender, and Elena valued both, respected both, but she taught the surrender because the surrender was harder and because the surrender was what her students needed.

"He was very fair," Deb said. "My husband. My ex-husband. Robert. He was a math teacher. He taught at Lincoln High School for thirty years. Geometry. He loved geometry. He loved the precision of it. The proofs. The way one statement led inevitably to the next, the way you could start with axioms and arrive at theorems and the arrival was certain, was guaranteed, as long as the logic was correct. He loved that certainty. He loved knowing where things led."

She paused.

"When he left, he divided everything. Mathematically. He had a spreadsheet. A literal spreadsheet. He went through the house and he listed every item and he assigned a value -- he used replacement cost, he was very precise about using replacement cost rather than sentimental value, because sentimental value is subjective and replacement cost is objective and he preferred the objective -- and he divided the total by two and he allocated items to each column until the columns were equal. Or as close to equal as he could get them. He spent a weekend on the spreadsheet. He showed it to me on a Sunday evening. He said, 'I want to be fair.' He said this the way he might say 'the interior angles of a triangle sum to one hundred and eighty degrees.' A statement of fact. An axiom. Fairness was his axiom."

"And the chairs," Elena said.

"And the chairs. The dining set was eight chairs. He took four. He left four. Equal division. Fair. Mathematically fair. He did not take the table because the table was too large to move in his car and because he said I could have the table, that the table was mine, that the table was more mine than his because I was the one who had chosen it, who had found it at the antique store on Hawthorne -- your neighborhood, actually, Hawthorne -- and who had loved it, the oak, the grain, the weight of it, the way it filled the dining room with its presence, and he was right, the table was mine, and he took the chairs because the chairs could be divided and the table could not."

She stopped. Elena waited. The waiting was the teaching. The waiting was the negative space around the student's words, the silence that gave the words their shape.

"And every morning," Deb said, "the light comes through the bay window and it falls across the table and it reaches the four chairs that are there and it falls through the four spaces where the chairs are not, and the light on the empty spaces is brighter than the light on the chairs because the chairs block the light and the empty spaces do not, and every morning I look at this and I think: he was fair. He was mathematically fair. He divided everything equally. And the fairness is the cruelest thing about it. Because if he had been unfair -- if he had taken more than his share, if he had been greedy or petty or vindictive -- I could be angry. Anger is easy. Anger has a shape. Anger is positive space. But he was fair. He was geometrically, precisely, spreadsheet-documented fair, and I cannot be angry at fairness, I can only be -- I can only sit at a table with four empty spaces and know that the emptiness was calculated, was planned, was the product of a formula, and the formula was correct, and the correctness is the thing I cannot forgive."

Elena was quiet for a long time. The room was quiet. The HVAC hummed. Janet's voice murmured through the wall. Kodak breathed under the desk, the steady, regular breathing of a dog who was asleep, who had heard enough human speech to know that the tone of this conversation did not require his alertness, that the distress in the room was not the kind that required intervention, was not physical, was the kind that required only presence, only the warm weight of a body nearby, and he provided this presence in his sleep, unconsciously, the way the floor provides support, the way the walls provide shelter, the way negative space provides definition.

"You are photographing the fairness," Elena said. "You are photographing the empty spaces that his fairness created. And the light that falls through those spaces -- the light that is brighter because the chairs are not there to block it -- that light is the photograph. That light is the visual fact of the absence. That light says: something was here and was removed, and the removal was precise, was calculated, was the result of a formula, and the formula left these spaces, these bright, empty, perfectly proportioned spaces where chairs used to be."

She reached out and found Deb's hand. She held it. The hand was cold. The hand was the hand of a woman who had been sitting in a room after the other students left and whose circulation had not been warmed by movement, by the body's ordinary thermal maintenance, and Elena held the cold hand and she said, "The photograph of the table is not about the divorce. The photograph of the table is about what light does to absence. Light makes absence visible. Light falls into the spaces where things were and it illuminates the spaces and the spaces become bright and the brightness is the record of the removal, the evidence of the subtraction, and the evidence is beautiful because light is always beautiful, even when it is illuminating something terrible, even when it is falling into the spaces where a life used to be."

Deb's hand tightened around Elena's. The tightening was slight but Elena felt it, felt it the way she felt everything now, with the heightened sensitivity of a person who has lost one sense and has compensated by deepening the others, the way a photograph compensates for the loss of depth of field by deepening the focus in the plane that remains sharp.

"Keep photographing the table," Elena said. "Do not stop. The series is not finished. The series will be finished when the light tells you it is finished, when the light has shown you everything it needs to show you, and you will know, you will feel it, the way I feel a correct exposure, the way I feel the developer working in the darkroom, by some sense that is not sight but is just as reliable, just as true. Keep photographing. The table is your subject and the light is your medium and the negative space -- the empty chairs, the missing half -- is the meaning, and you are making something important, something real, something that I cannot see but can hear in your voice when you describe it, and the hearing is enough for me to know that the work is good."

She released Deb's hand. She stood. She gathered her things. Kodak woke and stretched and yawned, the canine yawn that is not boredom but transition, the body's reset between states.

"Thank you," Deb said. "For listening."

"Listening is what I do," Elena said. "It is the positive space of my work. Everything else -- the things I cannot do, the seeing, the visual assessment, the ability to look at your photographs and tell you what I see -- that is the negative space. And the negative space defines the positive space, and the positive space is the listening, and the listening is sufficient, and the sufficiency is what I hold onto, the thing I carry, the shape of my life after the subtraction."

She walked to the door. She stopped.

"Deb," she said.

"Yes?"

"He took the chairs but he left the table. And the table is where the family gathers. The chairs are individual -- one person, one chair. But the table is communal. The table is where people come together. He left you the gathering place. He left you the center. He took the periphery. Think about that. Think about what remains."

She left. She walked down the hallway with Kodak and her cane and the weight of a conversation that was not about photography but was about everything that photography is about -- the selection of what to keep and what to remove, the composition of a life from the available elements, the management of negative space, the understanding that what is absent defines what is present, that the empty chair is as much a part of the room as the occupied chair, that the light falls on both, on the present and the absent, on the positive and the negative, and that the light does not judge, does not prefer, does not choose sides, but simply falls, and in its falling reveals the shape of things, the shape of what is there and what is not there, the shape of a life that has been divided mathematically and that now exists as two halves, each half defined by the absence of the other, each half illuminated by the same light, the same available, democratic, indifferent, beautiful light.