The Last Assignment

The Weight of Light

Chapter 28: The Last Assignment

She gave the assignment on the second Tuesday of November, three weeks before the end of the term, and the room went quiet in the way that rooms go quiet when a thing has been said that does not immediately make sense, the quiet of processing, of the mind encountering a proposition that the mind's existing categories cannot accommodate, a proposition that requires the construction of a new category, and the construction takes time, takes silence, takes the cognitive equivalent of the pause between the lightning and the thunder, the interval during which the brain is calculating the distance between what it knows and what it has just been told.

"Photograph something invisible," Elena said.

She let the sentence exist in the room.

"Not metaphorically invisible. Not hidden. Not small. Not obscured. Actually invisible. Something that exists in the world, that is present, that is real, that affects matter and energy and people, but that cannot be seen. Something that the eye cannot detect. Something that lives outside the visible spectrum, outside the range of wavelengths that the human retina processes, outside the domain of photography as you have understood it."

She could feel the confusion. Confusion has a sound -- it is the sound of people shifting in their seats, of pens being picked up and put down, of the throat-clearing and the shuffling that accompanies cognitive dissonance, the body's restless response to the mind's disturbance.

"I will give you examples," she said. "Light itself. You have been photographing things that are in the light. You have been photographing surfaces that the light illuminates. But you have not photographed the light. The light itself. The beam. The ray. The photon in transit. Light is invisible until it strikes a surface. You cannot see a laser beam in a vacuum. You can see it only when it passes through dust or fog or smoke, when it strikes particles and the particles scatter the light toward your eye. Light is invisible. Light, the medium of photography, the entire subject of this course, is invisible."

She moved to the side of the desk.

"Wind. Wind is invisible. You can see the effects of wind -- the bent tree, the rippled water, the lifted hair -- but you cannot see the wind itself. Wind is air in motion, and air is transparent, and transparency is a form of invisibility, and yet wind is real, wind has force, wind shapes landscapes and topples buildings and carries seeds across continents, and the reality of wind is indisputable even though the visibility of wind is zero."

She paused.

"Sound. Sound is invisible. You can see a speaker vibrating. You can see the surface of water rippling when sound strikes it. But you cannot see sound itself, cannot see the compression wave traveling through the air, cannot see the vibration of molecules that your ear interprets as music or speech or the bark of a dog or the click of a camera shutter. Sound is invisible and sound is the medium through which I teach this course, the medium through which I know your photographs, the medium that replaced sight for me and that has become, in its own way, as rich and as informative as sight, though different, always different."

She returned behind the desk.

"Gravity. Heat. Time. Emotion. Thought. Intention. The invisible world is larger than the visible world. The invisible world is the substrate on which the visible world sits, the way the ocean sits beneath the waves, the way the roots sit beneath the tree. The visible is the surface. The invisible is the depth. And photography, which is the art of the visible, which is the art of recording what the eye can see, must also contend with the invisible, must find ways to show what cannot be shown, to make visible what is by its nature hidden."

She sat on the desk's edge.

"This is your final assignment. Photograph something invisible. Find the invisible thing -- the wind, the sound, the gravity, the time, the grief, the love, the faith, whatever invisible thing compels you -- and find a way to make it visible. Not to illustrate it. Not to create a visual metaphor for it. Not to point the camera at a thing that represents the invisible thing. But to capture the invisible thing itself, through its effects, through its evidence, through the traces it leaves on the visible world, the way footprints in snow are not the person but are the evidence of the person, the way a shadow is not the object but is the evidence of the object's relationship to the light."

A hand went up. A voice spoke.

"But how?" the student said. Male. Young. The voice of a person who has been given an assignment and who wants instructions, who wants a procedure, who wants the step-by-step that will lead from the assignment to the completion of the assignment. "How do you photograph something you can't see?"

"How do I teach photography when I can't see?" Elena said. "The same way. You find the evidence. You find the trace. You find the mark that the invisible thing leaves on the visible world, and you photograph the mark. The mark is the photograph. The mark is the invisible made visible."

She could feel the student struggling. She could feel the room struggling. The assignment was deliberately impossible, deliberately paradoxical, deliberately designed to push the students past the boundary of what they understood photography to be, past the boundary of the visible, into the territory of the unseen, where photography had to become something else, had to become an act of interpretation rather than an act of recording, had to become art rather than documentation, and the pushing was uncomfortable, was disorienting, was the pedagogical equivalent of the darkroom -- a space where the familiar senses were inadequate and new senses had to be developed.

"Let me tell you a story," she said. "About an invisible photograph. About a photograph of something that could not be seen."

She closed her eyes behind her glasses.

"In 1952, Harold Edgerton, an electrical engineer at MIT, made a photograph of a bullet passing through an apple. The bullet was traveling at 2,800 feet per second. The human eye cannot see a bullet in flight. The bullet is invisible -- not because it is transparent but because it is too fast, because it moves through the visible world at a speed that exceeds the eye's ability to track it, and the exceeding is a form of invisibility, the invisibility of velocity."

She paused.

"Edgerton made the photograph using a strobe light that fired for one-millionth of a second. One-millionth. In that one-millionth of a second, the strobe froze the bullet and the apple and the explosion of the apple's flesh, the spray of juice and fiber and seed, and the photograph showed something that no human eye had ever seen -- the exact moment of the bullet's passage through the apple, the exact instant of destruction rendered visible by a flash of light so brief that it existed on the boundary between the measurable and the metaphysical."

She opened her eyes.

"Edgerton did not photograph the bullet. He photographed the invisibility of the bullet. He photographed the fact that the bullet was too fast to see, and he made the too-fast visible, and the making-visible was the art, was the technology, was the collaboration between the machine and the human, between the strobe and the eye, between the instrument that could see what the eye could not and the person who understood that the could-not-see was worth seeing."

She stood.

"You do not have a strobe light. You do not need one. You have something better. You have the understanding, developed over eleven weeks, that seeing is not a passive reception of visual information but an active, deliberate, trained engagement with the world. You have learned to see available light. You have learned to see negative space. You have learned to see the absence of chairs and the presence of light in the absence. You have learned to see your grandmother's face as a landscape of time. You have learned to see, and the seeing is the tool, and the tool is sufficient for this assignment, because the assignment does not require special equipment, it requires special seeing, it requires the ability to look at the visible world and find in it the evidence of the invisible world, the traces, the marks, the shadows cast by things that have no visible form."

She walked to the whiteboard. She wrote: EVERYTHING IMPORTANT IS INVISIBLE.

"Love is invisible," she said, standing at the board, the marker in her hand. "Grief is invisible. Faith is invisible. Time is invisible. Fear is invisible. Hope is invisible. The invisible things are the things that matter most, the things that drive human behavior, the things that photography pretends to capture by capturing the faces of people who are feeling them, but the faces are not the things, the faces are the surfaces on which the things register, the way a seismograph's needle is not the earthquake but the record of the earthquake."

She capped the marker.

"You have been photographing visible things all term. Objects. Surfaces. Light on surfaces. Now photograph the invisible thing that makes the visible thing matter. Photograph the love that makes the grandmother's teacup more than a teacup. Photograph the grief that makes the empty chair more than an empty chair. Photograph the time that makes the old face more than an old face. Photograph the invisible substrate. Photograph the depth beneath the surface. Photograph what you cannot see."

She set the marker on the tray.

"You have three weeks. Final portfolios are due on the last day of class. The invisible-thing photograph will be the last image in your portfolio, the final statement, the closing argument. It will be the image that tells the viewer what all the other images were about, what the whole term was about, what you learned in this room from a woman who cannot see about the art of seeing."

She gathered her things. She paused.

"I want to say one more thing about the invisible. About my relationship to the invisible. Because I live in the invisible. I live in a world where everything is invisible. Every face, every surface, every photograph, every sunrise, every color, every expression on every face in every room -- all invisible to me. The visible world is the invisible world for me. And the invisible world -- the world of sound and touch and smell and memory and the weight of light on my skin -- is the visible world for me. My visible and my invisible are inverted, are reversed, are the negative image of your visible and your invisible, and the inversion has taught me something that I could not have learned any other way: that the invisible is as real as the visible. That the invisible is more real than the visible. That the things you cannot see are the things that hold the world together, the gravity that keeps the planets in their orbits, the love that keeps the family in its orbit, the faith that keeps the photographer pressing the shutter even when the photographer cannot see what the shutter captures."

She walked to the door.

"Three weeks," she said. "Photograph the invisible. Make it visible. Show me what I cannot see. Show me what you cannot see. Show us both."

She left. The room emptied slowly, the students leaving in twos and threes, talking to each other, trying to figure out the assignment, trying to translate the paradox into a plan, trying to find the concrete in the abstract, the procedure in the philosophy, and the trying was the assignment, the trying was the lesson, the trying was the point.

Marcus sat in his seat for a long time after the room emptied. He sat and he thought about time. About the invisibility of time. About his grandmother, eighty-seven years old, sitting in her chair by the window every afternoon, drinking tea from a cup that was and was not the cup from Guangzhou, and time was in the room with her, time was in the light that changed as the afternoon advanced, time was in the lines on her face and the veins on her hands and the thin skin over her knuckles, and time was invisible, you could not see time, could not photograph time, time was the most invisible thing in the world and also the most present, the most constant, the most relentless, and Marcus sat in the empty classroom and he thought about how to make time visible, how to show the thing that could not be shown, and he thought about the light in his grandmother's kitchen, the light that changed as the afternoon moved, the light that was different at three o'clock than at four o'clock than at five o'clock, the light that marked the passage of time on the surfaces of the kitchen, on the counter and the cup and the grandmother's face, and the marking was the evidence, the marking was the trace, the marking was the way time left its footprint on the visible world, and Marcus sat in the empty classroom and he began to understand the assignment, began to see the invisible, began to feel the weight of something that had no mass, no volume, no color, no form, but that was there, was always there, was the thing that made his grandmother's face a landscape and her teacup a relic and her apartment a museum of the temporary, and the temporary was time, and time was invisible, and Marcus sat with the invisible thing and he began to plan how to show it, how to make it real, how to fix it in silver on paper, how to print the unprintable, how to see the unseeable.

Deb sat in her car in the parking lot for twenty minutes before she started the engine. She sat and she thought about grief. About the invisibility of grief. About the way grief lived in her body -- in her chest, in her throat, in the backs of her hands, in the soles of her feet when she stood in the dining room in the morning and looked at the table -- and the way grief was completely invisible, was undetectable by any instrument, was not on any scan or in any blood test, was not visible in any mirror, was the most present thing in her life and the most invisible thing in her life, and she thought about the table, the full table, the table with the new chairs, the chairs that did not match, and she thought about how the photograph of the full table was the saddest photograph she had made, sadder than the empty table, sadder than the light in the empty spaces, because the full table showed the repair, showed the attempt to fill what could not be filled, showed the inadequacy of the replacement, and the inadequacy was grief, the inadequacy was the invisible thing made almost-visible by the wrongness of the birch chairs against the oak table.

And Deb sat in her car and she thought about what Elena had said -- photograph the invisible thing that makes the visible thing matter -- and she thought about the table and the chairs and the light and the grief, and she thought that maybe the photograph was not of the table at all, maybe the photograph was of the light, just the light, just the morning light coming through the bay window with nothing in its path, no table, no chairs, no furniture, just the light entering an empty room, the light that had been the constant through the whole series, the light that had fallen on the full table and the half-empty table and the repaired table and that had been, all along, the subject, the real subject, the invisible thing that made all the visible things matter, the light that was itself invisible until it struck a surface, the light that existed only in its effects, in its evidence, in the things it touched and changed and revealed, and the light was the grief and the grief was the light and both were invisible and both were real and Deb sat in her car in the parking lot in the November rain and she understood, for the first time, what Elena had been teaching all along, what the whole course had been about, and it was not about cameras or exposure or composition or the rule of thirds or any of the technical apparatus of the medium, it was about the invisible, it was about the things that cannot be seen but that make the seen meaningful, it was about the light.