Light

And It's Responsibility For Darkness

The Takers, Ty Beaver, circa 2009

This is Reading Photographs, a newsletter for those interested in remarkably mundane photographs and why the details, ideas, emotions, memories, connections and beliefs they arouse make them meaningful.

---

One of the things I loved about photography when I was first experimenting was how it let me tell stories that I didn’t think I could write well.

Like horror stories.

I am by no means a horror aficionado. My horror movie tastes are pretty mainstream. I’m not a fan of Lovecraft, as much as I recognize how much he has contributed to the medium. I love to watch Ghost Adventures, primarily because it’s fun to watch a meathead pretend to get freaked out. 

In the past, when I have attempted to write something in the vein of horror, it comes off as a bit too existentialist, a bit too abstract. I’m not huge into gore or violence. Rather, I’m drawn to an unsettling sense of horror. Unexplainable. Vaguely threatening.

But photography provides different tools. Not just the camera, but light itself. Darkness only exists because light exists. We aren’t scared of what’s in the dark, we’re only scared when there’s enough light to see what’s in the dark.

In the world of the supernatural—that is, the world of people who are interested in the supernatural—one of the least understood and most terrifying entities are shadow people. These are dark or black masses that may be vaguely shaped like a person or not, but appear to flit in and out of someone’s line of sight. They are almost universally considered to be malevolent. People who suffer from sleep paralysis speak of them jumping onto them and attempting to choke them¹. Drug users, specifically those who use meth, tend to say they have seen them. But even someone who’s never had the sensation of sleep paralysis or been under the influence can see them, walking alone at night, certain they saw something move just outside the illuminated space around a street light or porch light.

And that’s where this image came from. To this day, even though I know who is in the photo (me) and how I made it (long exposure, off camera flash and some tulle stretched over the lens), it still unsettles me. 

No one excels at creating nightmares like ourselves.

1. Check out the documentary The Nightmare for a really good and terrifying set of narratives about people’s experiences with shadow people.