I live on the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia  and, as a result of my early morning poodlewalks along the coast,  I  I have become very aware of light,  and  especially the power and violence of light  in relation to photography.   My usual mode of photography is one of  being anxious to minimise or avoid the blinding or excessive light that results in blown highlights.  So I would normally photograph in soft or  low light situations (using both analog and digital cameras) to manage the  excessive and destructive  light.   

However, as a result of my experiences of the fluidity of  light along the coast during  this year  I have tentatively started to explore  light as the subject of photography. It is very tentative though: 

The traditional interpretation of light in our western culture contrasts  light with darkness, with light  standing for vision, reason, knowledge, truth and the real --eg.,as exemplified in  the Enlightenment movement.  On this interpretation light serves as a transparent medium in which truth and the objective world are revealed. Light unveils, clarifies, illuminates and makes the world around us perceptible and knowable. 

As is well known light figures prominently in the photographic tradition and discourse.  Thus the  traditional (19th century)  conceptions of photography as ‘light-writing’ and ‘sun-painting’,  effectively subordinate the role of the photographer as a creative agent to the productive and generative qualities of light, and constructs the photographer as a mere operator of a mechanical device – the camera. Photographs became documents of truth in which light, as a natural and extra-discursive agent transferred a trace of the ‘thing itself ’ directly and precisely onto the  emulsion of the film. 

The metaphor of light and darkness is the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics-- eg.,  Plato’s simile of the cave with its realm of shadow images within the cave and that of thought and truth under the sun outside the cave. This simile  has affinities with the dark box of the camera, and negatives inside the black box  (photographs)  as representations of the real world. Light and darkness is  the core of photographic discourse. 

I am not sure how to make light  the subject of photography though. A standard way  is the  practice of light painting--ie., using a small torch during long exposures to create various lines or movements of light within the image.  That doesn't appeal. Another possibility is to displace  the standard attempts to master light by  concentrating on the excess or the disruptive aspect of light that are destructive (eg., lens flare or fogged paper). If a lens hood  minimises the former  then  solarization  is a traditional way to deal with the latter.    Solarization is not the pathway where I want to go.

If the pathway is to make light the subject  of photography   then how to explore this?   From memory the Pictoralists thought that the light in Australia was unique (when compared to Britain)  and they used the bright  light in a landscape  to represent place and nationality. Focusing on light per se and not the landscape suggests  that I  can avoid the cultural nationalism of the Pictorialists.  This  brings to the fore  the excessive or over-flowing  light that represents a shifting and destabilizing force that  would normally be seen as destructive as it  degrades the image. 

Could the journey be one that makes the  over-flowing or dazzling  light productive rather than destructive? That  journey means experimentation.