The Weight of Light

There is a specific silence that follows the departure of a morning fog. It is not a true silence, of course, but a thinning of the world, as if the air itself has been scrubbed clean of everything that happened the night before. I remember the way my father’s study felt after he had cleared his desk for the final time; the dust motes dancing in the shafts of light were the only things left to occupy the space where his heavy, leather-bound ledgers once sat. We often mistake light for a presence, a warmth that fills a room, but light is also a thief. It bleaches the color from old photographs and hides the corners where shadows keep their secrets. When the sun hits a surface with such intensity that it obscures the details beneath, we are left looking at a ghost of the object rather than the object itself. What happens to the things we can no longer see because the brightness is simply too much to bear?

Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this tension in his beautiful image titled Blinded by the Sun. The way the light washes over the scene reminds me that sometimes, to see the truth of a moment, we must learn to look past the glare. Does the brilliance reveal more than it hides?