In visual culture, we often associate light and luminosity with objective clarity, as forces that illuminate truth and represent ideological purity. Photography is an imaging process that relies on the capture and impression of light, and during its historical emergence was commonly aligned with honesty and unfiltered reality. However, photographers’ control and manipulation of their medium results in pictures that, by the very process of their making, challenge these conceptions. Just as the reality represented in the photograph is inevitably tinted with social and ideological perspectives, the light contained does not illuminate so straightforwardly. What happens to the supposed “truthfulness” of light in documented moments where it burns out, blinds, conceals, or overexposes? 

This focused presentation features a selection of photographs from the Henry’s collections that explore uses of light to obscure, obliterate, and alter the photographic subject. Contrary to common conceptions of light as an innate aspect of the environment that passively aids vision, these images engage light as a device imposed upon a scene, intentionally framing what we see and how we see it. Beneath light sources both diffuse and punctuating, the subjects in these photographs navigate vulnerability and concealment. Here, luminosity obfuscates the supposed realities of space, time, movement, and identity, and reveals deeper truths than what sit at the surface of perception.  

Featured artists, including Karen Truax (U.S., b. 1946), Manuel Lucero (U.S., b. 1942), Aneta Grzeszykowska (Poland, b. 1974), and Arthur S. Siegel (U.S., 1913-1978), experiment with staging and photographic processes to capture instances in which light becomes tangible and active. Their images explore the work of light, exposure, and projection in conjunction with exertions of power, performance, and perspective.

This highlight is part of an ongoing rotation series on the Mezzanine that features work from the Henry’s extensive photography collection. The collection includes more than 4,000 historical and contemporary works that span the history of photography. Learn more about the Henry collections through our online collections search tool.