August 2008

MAJOR BLACK’S JOURNAL
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Finding a Language for Light

The ‘luminous print’

The heart of a luminous photograph is not its particular texture of light and shadow, real or perceived subject, the history of its capture, nor any other nameable ingredients. It’s not about the peculiar chisel and marble you choose to define darkness and fire, emptiness and form. Instead it’s about essence, nothing less than the mystery of why we’re here. Language is inadequate to describe the urgency of a remarkable image. Still, we persevere in seeking a language for light, in striving to find some way of sounding the riddle of a truly profound photograph—what I call a “luminous print.” The visible strength of any image lies in its tonal variance, the arabesque of light and shadow, the subtle dance of revelation and secret. With something as mysterious and elemental as light there are never any clear-cut answers. Sure, a practiced eye may insist on a consummate orchestration of composition, highlight, mid-tone, shadow, dramatic contrast and sharpness. But we’re still dealing with lux eterna, the heart of creation, the cosmic forge, the sun, the godhead or eye of a god, a nameless primordial incandescence so utterly beyond from as to incinerate the hero brave enough to attempt to behold it. All one can apprehend of light are but hints and guesses at eternal origin. Such luminance steals into the very soul of form. It points to the irreducible mystery of beauty and truth, the source of and essential complement to our familiar world of material content. The seemingly sourceless glow of a powerful image can tease the viewer out of thought and into reckoning with the irresistibly magnificent and unseen. It’s not too much, then, to say that a “luminous print” suggests the footprint of essence, the heart of light.

The ‘chisel and marble’

I use Nikon D-200 and Olympus E-10 cameras with a variety of lenses (18-400mm) and a Leica D-LUX 3. My printer is a Hewlett Packard Z3100 large-format (44″) ink-jet printer. The prints are on Hahnemühle 100% cotton-rag gallery grade papers. (Hahnemühle has been producing high quality paper since 1584. HP claims that photographs printed with the Z3100’s twelve Vivera pigment inks on this paper possess an archival life of “more than 200 years” (based on light fade testing under glass and thermal degradation tests by Wilhelm Imaging Research).

Prints are from RAW image files post-processed in Photoshop CS3 into print-ready, ICC-profiled TIF files.