The Visual World Of Shadows

A recent read: The Visual World Of Shadows, an exhaustive book about the forensic analysis of shadows.

Shadows have fascinated me ever since I started taking photographs. There was an interesting section in the book about shadows in paintings, which appear wrong when you analyze them. But they were all religious-based paintings. Why would it have been important for artists (or artisans if they were assigned to do the shadows--a "Shadow Specialist"), to analyze shadows when the focus of the paintings was religious in nature? Shadows are of course a detail, but not all details are of equal importance when the focus is somewhere else.

Details are something that photographs are very good at, even when the photographer isn't necessarily focused on all of them. Neural networks are good at analyzing photos because they need all the details to determine what they are. But when you're doing a painting you're not focusing just on the shadows--it's peripheral information. The gestalt is most important to the viewer; they're not thinking that shadows are wrong. That's not where the artist wants you to look.

In music, there are "shadows" as well, and I sometimes focus on them, but not as the central focus of the work. (A snare sound is a good example of a "shadow" element in pop music). But when you think about shadows placed in a painting as opposed to shadows appearing in a photograph, it's a different context. In my photographs, shadows can be the main focus, as it was in this photograph, which was just the shadows from 10th-century Southeast Asian art.

Shadows are decidedly artistic in any context--even when they are completely wrong. The fact that they are "wrong" makes them so.

Source: Video transcript