Foto Forum - In the Shadow, Similar or Like a Dream

In Focus, Out of Light

The alternation of day and night, the opening and closing of eyelids. The surfacing of details otherwise invisible, the search for shade in order to enjoy a bit of coolness while hiding from the sun. The tireless dynamism of living beings. One may consider it from whichever point of view one prefers, but that electromagnetic wave racing swiftly through the void continually makes manifest its indispensable role in alternations, variations, movements. Light is rhythm. We can recognize it in the dynamics of nature and detect it through certain devices, photography in particular. A pattern well known to the photographer Claudia Corrent, who with the project All'ombra simile o a un sogno has taken on the challenge of making that rhythm visible, drawing inspiration from a passage in the Odyssey in which Ulysses, having descended into Hades, encounters the shade of his mother and tries three times to embrace her, without success, since she is now ethereal.

What interests Corrent is both the irregularity of that presence and its immediate reference to the dreamlike dimension—typically intangible yet intense, though not necessarily clear; indeed, one often recalls dreams as distant, blurred fragments, if not as a complete absence of any detail. So how should one position oneself with respect to that rhythm? Corrent does not provide an answer, but instead allows a decisive condition that distinguishes her photographs to emerge: the more inclined we are to say that what we see are shadows, the more we must admit that we are nonetheless seeing something. And here lies the point Corrent invites us to consider: this happens because we cannot speak only of darkness, but equally of light.