Monday, May 10, 2010

Messieur Silhouette

Light often falls on its beginnings; sometime we have to go in search of that place - and know it when we arrive.

I love the way Light reveals other world, draws distinction, renders a clarity otherwise eluded.

I saw a reverse forest silhouette while hiking, a few years before I discovered the camera, I have never forgotten that image and have been searching for its essence for more than three decades. From time to time, I walk again in the woods, or in a market, or in this case a Paris shoe shop, and whispers of that long ago image tickle my thoughts, my eyes search, it's their hiding in plain sight.

To be in Paris and struck by a silhouette made me smile. Drawn from the name of Messieur Étienne de Silhouette, the notoriously cheap Controller-General of French king Louis XV, the word refers to a cheap form of portraiture, mocking the parsimonious Étienne de Silhouette. But ironically the most perfectly executed silhouettes are capture a beauty rarely otherwise seen.

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