* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia
The Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki (1886 – 1965) made us see in his essay The Praise of Shadow (1933) that this element associated with darkness, in reality, gives us more luminosity and color than it may seem to us.
“In the West, the most powerful ally of beauty has always been light; in traditional Japanese aesthetics the essential thing is to capture the enigma of shadow,” explains Tanizaki, who has inspired me to prepare this photographic report for The Photos of the Readers of La Vanguardia, contemplating the geometric silhouettes of shadows of different tones in an office. The everyday is an inspiration of beauty.
Is it true that in the West beauty has always been associated with bright and white, while dull and black have always had a negative connotation? In the East, semi-darkness enhances beauty. Chinese shadows or Chinese shadows were the precedent of shadow theater. But what can we say about the use of chiaroscuro as an artistic element in our Western culture?
Two examples are sfumato and silhouette, techniques that make deliberate use of shadow effects. Murillo, the baroque painter, even praised it in one of his paintings in 1660.
It is precisely during the Baroque when the use of shadow acquired its maximum splendor in paintings. Through the use of light and shadow, artists managed to convey the sensation of depth.
The shadow is an inspiring element. There are countless examples (in the novel Peter Pan the protagonist loses his shadow), but the seventh art is perhaps the most current example of this, since cinema is properly moving lights and shadows projected on a screen.
Without light and shadow this photographic report would not exist, since photography essentially consists of recording patterns of light, shadow and color. In this way, highlights and shadows are the brightest and darkest parts, respectively, of a scene or image.
Nowadays, editing programs and filters, for example, in applications like Instagram, play precisely with lights, shadows and colors.
Therefore, perhaps the conclusion we could reach is that the most powerful ally of beauty is not light, nor shadow, but rather light and shadow form a whole that ensures the existence of both.
