Hippolyte bayard biography of christopher columbus

LIGHT HAS SO OFTEN, and in so many cultures, been used as a metaphor for higher knowledge and spiritual well-being that you might think it was some rare element, like lustrous gold. Yet light is quite literally everyday—a universal medium basic to life, a gift so commonplace that we take it for granted, the way the fish takes for granted the sea. The richness and the ordinariness of light coexist in photography. Beginning as theory in the 19th century, the medium has evolved as both esthetic and practical, so practical, in fact, that we risk here another comparison to the fish swimming uncritically in the sea of photographic images. Catching shadows that distill samples of the passing illuminations, the impartial lens transcribes indiscriminately whatever is put before it. Yet the pictures that result depend on the photographer’s visual intelligence to focus our attention (and intention). This subjective manipulation of objective equipment has both esthetic and industrial applications, and in the relatively short period since photography was introduced, it has become an omnipresent element of global culture. The 19th century’s first faint tracings of natural light have been followed

•