Available Light

The Weight of Light

Chapter 4: Available Light

The lecture hall had two kinds of light on Thursday morning: the fluorescent tubes overhead, which hummed at a frequency that Elena could hear but the students could not, a frequency of sixty hertz that lived just below the threshold of conscious perception, like tinnitus, like the background radiation of the institutional world, and the natural light from three tall windows on the east wall, which at nine in the morning in September in Portland meant that the light was indirect, was not sunlight but was the light that remained after the clouds had filtered the sunlight, had diffused it, had removed its directionality and its harshness and its opinion and had replaced these qualities with a soft, even, democratic illumination that fell on every surface with the same gentle indifference, the light of the Pacific Northwest, the light that photographers here either loved or hated and that Elena had always loved because it was honest light, it was light that did not flatter or accuse, it simply was, and it fell on things and showed them as they were, without drama, without editorial comment, and the things it showed were not more or less beautiful for being shown in this light, they were just more visible, more legible, more available for inspection.

"Available light," Elena said, and she wrote the words on the whiteboard behind her, writing by feel and by the spatial memory she had of the board's location, writing in letters that were, she knew, imperfect, that sloped slightly downward to the right, that were too large or too small, that occupied the board with the careless authority of handwriting that does not need to be beautiful because it needs only to be present, to be a mark on a surface, to be proof that the instructor has identified the subject.

"Available light is the light that exists. The light that is already in the room, in the street, in the world, before you arrive with your camera. Available light is the light you do not bring. It is the light you find."

She capped the marker. She set it on the tray below the board. She turned to face the room, which she could not see but could feel, the composite presence of twenty-two bodies, their breathing, their shifting, the tiny sounds of attention and distraction that told her the room was with her, was tracking her, was oriented toward her voice the way the east-facing windows were oriented toward the morning.

"There is a tradition in photography that goes back to the beginning of the medium, a tradition of bringing your own light. Studio light. Flash. Continuous light. Ring lights. Softboxes. Reflectors. The entire apparatus of artificial illumination that a photographer deploys to control the image, to determine exactly what the viewer will see and how they will see it. This tradition is not wrong. It is powerful. It has produced extraordinary images. Richard Avedon worked in controlled light. Irving Penn worked in controlled light. Annie Leibovitz works in controlled light, and her work is magnificent, and the light in her work is intentional and precise and the product of enormous skill."

She paused. She took a breath. She could feel the room waiting.

"But."

The word hung in the air. A single syllable. A fulcrum.

"But there is another tradition. And this tradition says: do not bring light. Find light. Go into the world with your camera and your eyes and nothing else, and see what light exists, and use that light, and only that light, to make your photograph. This tradition is called available light photography, and it is what we will study first, because it is the foundation of seeing, because it teaches you to notice what is already there, and if you cannot notice what is already there, you have no business adding to it."

She moved to the side of the desk, her hand trailing along its edge, and she stood beside it rather than behind it, closing the distance between herself and the first row of desks by two feet, by an intimacy that the students could feel even if they could not measure it.

"Henri Cartier-Bresson," she said, "worked almost exclusively in available light. He called the camera an extension of his eye. He did not modify the world. He waited for the world to arrange itself into a photograph, and then he pressed the shutter. He called this the decisive moment, and the decisive moment is not a moment you create, it is a moment you recognize, and you can only recognize it if you are paying attention to the light, because the light is what makes the moment decisive, the light is what lifts a moment out of the ordinary flow of time and pins it to the surface of a photograph and says: this, here, now, this is what it looked like, this is how the light fell, this is what the world offered and what the photographer accepted."

She heard a pen moving on paper. She heard the faint percussion of fingers on a laptop keyboard, a student taking notes electronically, and she did not object because she had decided in her first term that she would not police the method of note-taking, that the battle between paper and screen was a battle she did not need to fight, that her job was to say things worth recording and not to dictate the medium of the recording.

"Light has properties," she said. "Light has direction. Light has quality. Light has color temperature. Light has intensity. These are not metaphors. These are physical facts. Light is electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum, wavelengths between approximately 380 and 700 nanometers, and when this radiation strikes a surface, it does one of three things: it is absorbed, it is reflected, or it is transmitted. The color of an object is determined by which wavelengths it absorbs and which it reflects. The shadow on the far side of an object is determined by the direction from which the light arrives. The texture of a surface is made visible by the angle of the light relative to that surface, what we call raking light, light that arrives at a steep angle and catches the tiny elevations and depressions of a surface and turns them into a landscape of highlight and shadow that the eye reads as texture."

She was lecturing now, really lecturing, not performing but transmitting, and the room could feel the difference, could feel that this woman was not reciting from notes she could not read but was speaking from a body of knowledge so deeply integrated into her understanding that it came out the way breath comes out, involuntary, essential, the product of twenty years of practice and study and the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute attention to light that was the defining characteristic of her professional life, a life that had ended, technically, three years ago, but that had not ended, could not end, because the knowledge was in her, was part of her, was as much a component of Elena Vasquez as her bones and her blood and her stubbornly functioning, stubbornly useless eyes.

"Light has weight," she said, and the room went quiet, the particular quiet that happens when a statement is made that the listeners do not understand but suspect they should.

"I am being precise," she said. "I am not being metaphorical. Light has weight. Photons have momentum. When light strikes a surface, it exerts pressure on that surface. The pressure is infinitesimally small -- you will never feel sunlight pushing against your hand -- but it is real, it is measurable, it is a physical fact. And I want you to think about this fact when you are making photographs, because the fact that light has weight means that light is not passive, light is not a neutral medium through which we see the world, light is an active presence in the world, light arrives at a surface and does something to it, changes it, illuminates it, warms it, and the photograph you make is a record of that doing, that changing, that arriving and pressing and altering."

She moved back behind the desk. She took a drink of water. She set the bottle down.

"Now. Let me describe a room."

The students waited. They did not know what she was going to do. They had taken notes on Cartier-Bresson and electromagnetic radiation and the pressure of photons, and they expected more of the same, more facts, more history, more of the architectural scaffolding of a lecture that had been, so far, excellent and clear and delivered with the authority of someone who knew her subject, and they waited.

"I am going to describe the light in this room," Elena said. "And I want you to check my description against what you see. I want you to look at the room while I describe it, and I want you to tell me where I am wrong, if I am wrong, and I want you to notice the things I describe that you had not noticed, and I want you to ask yourself why you had not noticed them."

She stood very still. She tilted her head slightly, the way Kodak tilted his head when he heard a sound he was processing, and the tilt was not affectation, it was method, it was the physical posture of listening and feeling that had replaced the physical posture of looking, the turning of the head that had once directed her gaze now directing her other senses, her skin, her ears, the spatial awareness that blindness had not destroyed but had amplified, the way a darkroom amplifies the importance of touch and smell.

"The fluorescent lights overhead are on," she said. "I can hear them. They emit a hum at sixty hertz, which most of you cannot hear but which is there. Fluorescent light is flat. It comes from above and it falls evenly and it casts diffused shadows that have soft edges. If the fluorescent lights were the only light source in this room, everything would look flat. Your faces would look flat. The surfaces of the desks would look flat. There would be no modeling, no dimensionality, no sense of depth. Fluorescent light is the enemy of texture. It is the enemy of drama. It is the light of convenience, not the light of seeing."

She paused.

"But the fluorescent lights are not the only light source in this room. There are windows on the east wall. Three windows. The light from those windows is different from the fluorescent light. It is coming from one direction -- from the east -- and it is creating directional shadows. If you are sitting near the windows, the left side of your face -- the side toward the window -- is brighter than the right side of your face. The difference may be subtle, because the fluorescent lights are filling in the shadows, but it is there. Look at the person next to you. Look at their face. One side is brighter. One side is darker. The difference between those two sides is the ratio, the lighting ratio, and it is the ratio that creates the sense of a three-dimensional face on a two-dimensional photograph."

She heard movement. She heard people turning to look at each other. She heard the small eruption of recognition, the murmur of students discovering that what she described was true, that the light in the room had a direction they had not noticed, that their own faces were divided into a bright side and a dark side, and that a woman who could not see had told them this from behind a desk.

"The light from the windows," she said, "is soft today. Portland in September. Overcast. The clouds are acting as a diffuser. If it were a sunny day, the window light would be hard -- it would create sharp-edged shadows, high contrast, strong modeling. Today it is soft. The shadows have gentle transitions. The highlights are not blown out. This is beautiful light for portraits, for still life, for anything you want to render with subtlety and nuance. This is the light that photographers pay thousands of dollars to replicate in studios with softboxes and diffusion panels, and it is free, it is here, it is falling through the windows right now, and most of you did not notice it until I told you to look."

She could feel the room shifting. She could feel the quality of the attention changing, deepening, acquiring the weight that attention acquires when it is directed at something real, something present, something the listener can verify by turning their head and looking.

"There is a third light source in this room," she said, "and you have definitely not noticed it. The walls of this room are painted white. Or near-white -- institutional white, which is actually a very pale warm gray, because true white is too harsh for a classroom and the facilities department knows this even if they could not articulate why. The white walls are reflecting the window light. They are bouncing it back into the room. They are acting as fill cards, which is what photographers use in studios to fill in shadows -- large white surfaces that catch the main light and redirect it into the shadow side of the subject. The walls of this room are fill cards. They are softening the shadows. They are reducing the contrast. They are making the light more even, more forgiving, more democratic. And they are doing this without anyone asking them to, without anyone noticing, without anyone understanding that the architecture of this room is participating in the lighting of this room, that the walls are not passive surfaces but active collaborators in the quality of light you are sitting in right now."

She stopped. She let the silence work. She let the students sit in the room they had entered thirty minutes ago and see it for the first time, see the light that had been there when they walked in, the light they had walked through and sat in and breathed in without seeing, the light that was on their faces and on their desks and on their hands and on the white walls that were bouncing it softly back into the room, the light that was available, that was offered, that was free, that asked only to be noticed.

"This," she said, "is available light. It is the light you do not bring. It is the light you find. And your first job as a photographer is to find it, to see it, to understand it, to describe it. Before you compose, before you focus, before you press the shutter, you must see the light. You must know where it is coming from and where it is going and what it is doing to the surfaces it touches. If you do not know this, you are not making a photograph. You are pressing a button."

A hand went up. Elena did not see it.

The student remembered.

"Can I ask a question," the student said. Male. The same voice from the first class, the student who had arrived first, who had taken a syllabus and not read it, the student whose name Elena had learned from the roster was Marcus Huang.

"Yes."

"How do you know all that? About the room. The windows. The walls. How do you know what the light is doing if you can't --" He stopped. She could hear the stop. She could hear the sentence colliding with the thing he did not want to say, the observation he did not want to make, the obvious fact that he felt was somehow impolite to state.

"If I can't see it," Elena finished for him. "You can say it. The word is blind. It is not an insult. It is a description."

"Right," Marcus said. "How do you know?"

"I know because I can feel the warmth on my left side, which tells me the windows are to my left. I know because I can hear the fluorescent lights overhead. I know because I designed this room's lighting in my mind when I first started teaching here, when I could still see, and I committed it to memory because I knew I would need it, because I knew my sight was going and I was storing the world like a squirrel stores acorns, against the winter that was coming, the long winter that has no spring. And I know because I understand light. I understand it the way a musician understands music. A musician does not need to see a piano to know what a chord sounds like. A musician does not need to see the score to hear the symphony. Knowledge of an art is not the same as the sensory perception of the art. I cannot see the light, but I know the light. I know what it does. I know how it behaves. I know its physics and its aesthetics and its moods. And I can teach you to know it, and then you will see it, and then you will make photographs with it, and the photographs will be better than any photographs you would make with a studio full of equipment and no understanding of what light does."

The room was quiet. The room was the kind of quiet that Elena recognized from the field, from the moments in Sarajevo and Kabul and Aleppo when something had happened that changed the terms of engagement, that shifted the ground, that made everyone recalibrate their understanding of the situation. The room was recalibrating.

In the back, Deb Whitfield was writing. She was writing quickly, her pen moving across the notebook with the urgency of a person who is trying to capture something before it evaporates, before the precise arrangement of words is lost to the general noise of paraphrase and approximation. She was writing: Knowledge of an art is not the same as the sensory perception of the art. She was writing: The walls are not passive surfaces but active collaborators. She was writing things that were not photography things, that were life things, that were things about how to exist in a world that had changed on her, that had rearranged itself when her husband left, that had become a room she recognized but could no longer navigate, and she was beginning to understand, dimly, in the way that understanding begins -- not as a thought but as a feeling, not as a conclusion but as a direction, a leaning, an orientation of the body toward a source of warmth -- that this course was not about photography, or it was about photography the way a poem is about its subject, which is to say it was about photography and also about everything else, about attention and loss and the refusal to be diminished by the removal of the thing you thought defined you.

Elena continued.

"I want to talk about direction," she said. "Light comes from somewhere. It arrives. And the direction from which it arrives determines everything. Front light -- light that comes from the same direction as the camera -- is flat. It eliminates shadows. It is the light of passport photographs and mugshots. It is not interesting. It is merely informative. Side light -- light from ninety degrees -- is dramatic. It divides the subject in half. It creates deep shadows and bright highlights and a strong sense of volume and texture. It is the light of Rembrandt, literally. Rembrandt used a single window as his light source and he placed his subjects beside it and the window light fell on one side of their faces and the other side fell into shadow and between the light and the shadow was the human face, in all its complexity, revealed by the simple fact that the light came from one direction and not from all directions."

She paused.

"Back light -- light from behind the subject -- is the most interesting and the most difficult. It creates silhouettes. It creates rim light. It creates the halo effect, where the edges of the subject glow because the light is wrapping around them, outlining them, defining them by their edges rather than by their surfaces. Back light is the light of mystery. It says: I will show you the shape of this person but not their face. I will show you the outline but not the interior. And that is a powerful statement, because sometimes the shape of a thing tells you more than the surface of a thing, and sometimes the refusal to show everything is more honest than the attempt to show everything."

She thought of the photograph she had made in Kabul, the women in the market, the blue burqas, the image that was almost abstract. She thought of it the way she thought of all her photographs now: as a memory of making, not as a memory of seeing. She remembered the angle of the light and the weight of the camera in her hands and the moment she pressed the shutter, the mechanical click of the Leica's shutter, a sound she could still hear in her sleep, a sound that was the punctuation of her life, the period at the end of every sentence of seeing, the click that said: I saw this, I was here, I committed this to silver halide, I took this piece of the world and fixed it.

"Your assignment," she said, "is on page three of the syllabus. I know I said that on Tuesday. I am saying it again because some of you did not read it. I can tell because some of you are not carrying cameras. The assignment requires a camera."

A rustle. A murmur. The sound of students realizing they had not done what they were supposed to do, which was a familiar sound, a sound she heard every term, the sound of unpreparedness meeting expectation.

"The assignment is this: photograph one object in your home using only window light. No flash. No lamp. No ring light. No overhead light. Turn them all off. Close the doors to rooms that have lights on. Find one window. Find one object. Place the object near the window, or find the object where it naturally sits near a window. And make one photograph. One exposure. One chance. Not twelve exposures from which you will choose the best one. One. Because when you have one chance, you will pay attention. When you have one chance, you will see the light. When you have twelve chances, you will click and hope and rely on the mathematics of probability rather than the discipline of seeing, and this is a course in seeing, not a course in probability."

She picked up her water bottle. She drank. She set it down.

"I want you to think about what I described today. The light in this room. The windows. The walls. The fluorescent tubes. I described the light in this room without seeing it. Now I want you to go home and see the light in your home with your eyes, and I want you to see it the way I described it: not as a general ambiance but as a physical presence with direction and quality and color and weight. See where the light comes from. See where the shadows fall. See what the light does to the surfaces of the objects in your home. And then choose one object and one window and make one photograph."

She moved to the side of the desk and leaned against it, a posture that was less formal, less authoritative, more human, the posture of a person who has finished performing and is now speaking.

"I had a photography teacher," she said. "A long time ago. Before the wars. Before everything. I was nineteen and I was at the University of Texas at Austin and my teacher was a man named William Crawford, who was seventy years old and who had been an Army photographer in Korea and who had spent the rest of his life teaching undergraduates how to see. And on the first day of his available light class, he took us outside and he said, 'Point at the sun.' And we all pointed at the sun. And he said, 'That is where the light is coming from. Now point at the shadows.' And we pointed at the ground, at the shadows our bodies made. And he said, 'That is where the light is going. Everything you need to know about available light is in the space between where the light comes from and where the shadows go. The rest is refinement.'"

She straightened. She took the marker from the tray and uncapped it and wrote on the board, writing from memory, writing in the large, slightly uneven letters that were the handwriting of a woman who could not see what she was writing but who wrote anyway, because the act of writing on the board was an act of teaching and the teaching did not stop because the seeing had stopped.

She wrote: AVAILABLE LIGHT IS NOT WHAT YOU BRING. IT IS WHAT YOU FIND.

She capped the marker. She placed it on the tray.

"Thursday," she said. "Bring your photographs. Bring your words. You will describe what you made. Class dismissed."

They left, and the room emptied, and the light continued to fall through the windows and onto the white walls and back into the room, the light performing its patient work for an audience of one, a woman who could not see it but who understood it, who had described it with a precision that startled the sighted, who had shown a room full of people with functioning eyes what was in front of them, what had been in front of them all along, the light they walked through every day without seeing, the light that was available, that was free, that was everywhere, that asked only to be noticed, that had weight, that had direction, that had opinion, that was the subject and the medium and the meaning of the art she could no longer practice but would never stop teaching.