The Light That Casts No Shadow

This photo is more of a technical photo than an art photo. As the title says, I wanted to see if I could light something without creating a shadow. I think I have succeeded pretty well and I did not use Photoshop. I was inspired for this photo by two sources: Sam Taylor-Wood's Bram Stoker's Chair and a passage from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. 


Barthes, discussing a photo by Richard Avedon, says, "in the photograph, I read an air of goodness (no impulse of power: that is certain). Thus the air is the luminous shadow which accompanies the body; and if the photographer fails to show this air, then the body moves without shadow, and once this shadow is severed, as in the myth of the Woman without a Shadow, there remains no more than a sterile body". While I do not know of Taylor-Wood ever mentioning any influence on her work by this passage, I think the lack of shadow works similarly in her photos: it questions the relation of the figure and object. By having the figure cast a shadow but the chair none and from the title of the series, we can deduce that Taylor-Wood is playing with the idea that, like some myths concerning vampires in which they do not cast shadows, the chair (Bram Stoker's, author of Dracula) does not cast a shadow. However, having the figure cast a shadow but not the chair is an odd reversal. This is where Barthes' idea comes in. As has been suggested perhaps vampires cast no shadow because they have no soul. Thus an object, chair, camera lens, or otherwise would not cast a shadow. All of this has been simply to say that the ridding of an object of its shadow is a way of dehumanizing it.

* I would note that I am pretty sure Sam Taylor-Wood did use some sort of post production processing such as Photoshop to get rid of the shadows and balance the chair.