I used to be afraid of the sun. Its harshness felt violent and unforgiving in my photos. But I’ve always been drawn to images marked by hard contrasts. So often in life it is during these moments of stark light and deep shadow that the ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary: a stranger’s silhouette illuminated against the window of a moving train; the curve of a lover’s profile rendered unfamiliar by a street lamp at midnight; the quiet perfection of a bowl of figs lying half in, half out of a ray of sun lazily stretching across the table on a late summer evening; even a surprise glimpse of our own body in a dim hotel room as it’s thrown into contrast by the opening of a bathroom door. Still, the peculiar appeal of these occurrences is somewhat difficult to quantify. I’m reminded of how Freud describes the uncanny (Unheimlich), or instances when the familiar becomes suddenly strange. The duality of known/unknown evokes a sense of the clandestine, of secrecy, of something emerging from the shadow of our subconscious. We are drawn to the ambiguity, the play between imaginary and real, between presence and absence, just as we are drawn to the works of art that capture it. The Italian artist Caravaggio called light an “instrument of spirituality" and used it to bring out the sublime and the mystical in tableaus of otherwise everyday scenes. As I look at his paintings I wonder if here too it is the element of the unknown that makes clair-obscur so striking. The light calls our attention to the subject, but the deep shadow leaves room for interpretation, for imagination, for mystery. Somewhat fittingly, it was a stranger who revealed to me the change in my relationship with light. I now try to lean into that which I once avoided — perhaps not for the light itself, but for what lies unrevealed in the shadow it casts. In fact, photography is light; camera obscura, through a pin-hole a world revealed upside-down. But, because of this, it is also the opposite. It occurs to me that perhaps within this « entre-deux » there exists a form of freedom, a space where the mind can wander, a place where I can meet myself in the dark...