This is my second attempt in my little project of photographing light per se:
On this occasion I endeavoured to simplifiy things down to the bare minimum. I'm at the western edge of Encounter Bay on Jetty Rd that runs alongside Rosetta Head in the early morning. I'm precariously balanced on some rocks at the very edge of the sea. It is early in the morning just after sunrise. The advantage of digital is its flexibility as working with a tripod and film would be much more difficult.
I'm standing the rocks with sea lapping around my feet watching the light move over the sea. It was shifting and changing all the time because of the clouds. The sea is the ground of light as it were. This conception of light depends upon the ground that lets that conception comes out
There is only 20 or so seconds between the above photo and the one below of physical light. Whilst standing on the edge of the sea I realized that the early morning light is very different to moonlight. For the Romantics moonlight or the dimming light of the sunset, is associated with the ‘modifying colours of the imaginationThis focus on physical light is quite different to how the Romantics interpreted light.
As is well known the mind, for the Romantics, was considered to contribute to the construction of the world in the very process of perceiving it; and in doing so, radically transforms it into something new by shedding over it the radiance of its inner light—the light of the visionary faculty of the imagination.
As M.H Abrams states in his The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition ‘… in the romantic writers, the favourite analogy of the activity of the perceiving mind is that of a lamp projecting light.’ In terms of Adams history of western aesthetic my photography of light would be seen as an art which acts as a mirror upon life.