Seeing the light

All photographers depend on light, but Richard Ross takes it as his subject. Alain de Botton is intrigued

GIVEN how sensitive we are to it, it's surprising how bad we are at describing light. We say it is dark or bright, dim or clear, but our experiences of light, like that of time, are largely private and preconscious; they slip through our fingers when we attempt a verbal definition, driving us to metaphor to capture the nuances. Photographers on the other hand, though they may not speak of it, are masters of light. Whatever their putative subject matter, all photographs are at heart about light. It is the first thing photographers notice when shooting - how much of it is there, where is it coming from, is it diffuse or direct, how fast is it changing, flash or not?

Richard Ross, an American photographer best known for his work on museums, has spent the last 10 years on a series of photographs devoted to the theme of light. Though the photographs show a diverse range of settings - temples in Vietnam, an arcade in Las Vegas, a museum in Denmark - in each case Ross wishes to draw our attention primarily to the quality of the light. It sets up a peculiar challenge to viewers. We are invited to study an aspect of photographs we rarely dwell on, we have been told that the point of these photographs is not the objects depicted, but the way the light is falling upon them. Like being asked to listen for a particular noise, it directs, and hence sharpens our sensitivity. Suddenly we have the encouragement and means to meditate on an aspect of the world we normally rush past. Ross's concern for light effects a kind of resurrection, one characteristic of art: by knowing how to capture subtleties of light, he enables us to see them. He freezes moments of time in order to bring to our attention, from the deadness caused by inattention and habit, a valuable yet neglected aspect of existence.

Each of Ross's photographs could be an entry in an imaginary picture- dictionary of light, each photograph is a definition of a universal kind of light, found in a given setting, but capable of recurring in other places at other times. I have never been to Barcelona, to the foot of the staircase where Ross found a baby giraffe with a cute, impish expression, its neck angled towards the door - but the light falling on the beige-brown walls is entirely familiar to me. It is the soft, tentative light of clear cold mornings in warm countries. Soon the sun will rise in the sky, the noises of the city will grow louder, and the concrete walls will heat to the touch. At two o'clock, there will be an intense, exhausted light where now there is an air of promise and vulnerability.

Lights, like smells, have the capacity to act as the guardians of our memories. They evoke portions of our past which we had forgotten, or remembered only in a flattened form. Lights contain our biographies, they can remind us of who we are. Ross's picture of mythological statues in a Danish museum is bathed in the freezing blue light that brought back memories of a performance of Richard III I had once attended in a glacial church in Cambridge, Ross's lanterns from Chile reminded me of dusk on the veranda of a hotel in Jerusalem, where I had sat drinking a Coca-Cola as an eight-year-old boy anxiously waiting with my older sister for our parents to return from a sightseeing trip to the Dead Sea. Lights carry deep emotional resonances. There are sad and happy lights, shy lights, philosophical lights, virginal lights. Ross's photograph of a Venetian ferry at dusk could, in my emotional dictionary of light, be defined as: slightly melancholic, romantic, contemporary light, rescued from real sadness by the warmth of the evening sky (one imagines there may be cicadas and we know we are south of Paris at least), it is the light at the close of a day on holiday, perhaps the last evening before the flight back to northern climates.

Correspondences between moments of our own lives and Ross's photographs do not diminish the latter, but reveal the universal nature of what has been seized. There are fewer kinds of light in the world than there are places and times. The same lights repeat themselves across oceans and decades. Ross's photographs help us to typologise and identify them, they teach us the language of light.

Richard Ross's photographs will be on show at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 01703 592 158, early next year. More of his images of light can be seen on the Internet at www. silcom.com/rross/light