Light Passing Through

We Are the Spirit Rappers (2012)
(Credit: copyrighted image courtesy of Amy Friend)

Amy Friend’s photographic series “Dara Alla Luce” whispers ephemeral. Orbs of light give form to lines of the body, subjects whose physiology has long been returned to the dirt of the earth. Dara alla luce is Italian, translated as “to bring to the light.”

We are creatures of the light, and our light burns out eventually. We can be here one moment, then gone the next, and only the gauzy outlines of our physical constellation remain.

All That’s Solid Melts Into Air (2012)
(Credit: copyrighted image courtesy of Amy Friend)

In the same way that our bodies give way to the disintegrating forces of life and death, so too does a photograph, however much it appears to stare down mortality.

Photographs whisper to us, moments from the past suspended. Like our own bodies — these brief containers of light and breath — photographs decompose. Vintage photographs darken, as their light gives way to the stasis of darkness.

Latent Light (2012)
(Credit: copyrighted image courtesy of Amy Friend)

In a photograph — literally “light marking” — we search the face of a loved one, yearning for details of their presence once they are gone.

I have trilled in excitement at seeing my genes in true sepia, as I peered into the light emanating from the eyes of my ancestors. That captured light will fade too.

Light is by nature fugitive. We only see traces of its passing.

Boxes and books filled with photographs, either of family or of strangers, are the deep, visual archive of the last 150 years.

By altering found vintage photographs, Friend relights the archive, retracing it through holes poked into paper photographs, allowing the form of the subject to return to the surface, altered and absent and present, all at once.

Working together with California Sunday Magazine, Friend recently produced a series of images in full color for an article on an apt subject: death. In a combination of vintage photographs and those produced by the magazine, light orbs flow through and around physical forms, reminding us of both the nature of photography and the ephemerality of being.

Credit: copyrighted image courtesy of Amy Friend/California Sunday Magazine

A small hand, presumably of a child, rests against the palm of a larger hand, which is blanketed by orbs of light. The larger hand is lighted up and loses form, and in doing so it gives greater outline to the child’s hand, which appears as solid matter. One generation gives way to the next. The poignancy of the hand-to-hand connection increases as loss of form is felt and seen.

Credit: copyrighted image courtesy of Amy Friend/California Sunday Magazine

Three people on a beach hold onto each other, embracing as they approach the water’s edge. We read curiosity in their flesh as they contact the materiality of the sea. The woman in the middle is dabbled by the now familiar language of the light. We see friendship, all the sweeter as these three materialize the beauty and pain of physical transience.

In a world steeped in selfies and the foreverness of the digital age, the effervescent quality of photography – light waves burned into a substrate they pass through – can now be reworked and re-imagined. Some paper photographs become digitized, moving into the new archive; others will fall away and be forgotten.

Those lucky vintage photographs plucked by Friend are given new life; she breathes light into the past and sparks emotional stirrings and imagination about our own fleeting, orbed bodies of light.

All artwork in this post is copyrighted, and is used here by permission from Amy Friend and California Sunday Magazine.