Ineffable Light
2006
I first encountered these doors while photographing crematoriums for Metamorphosis in 2001. The portholes fitted into the doors of the cremation chambers stopped me every time. They were small, circular, built into the metal to allow someone to see inside while the chamber was in use. I could have looked. I chose not to. The distance I kept from them then, the distance I was not willing to close, stayed with me for five years.
Ineffable Light is a record of that distance.
Returning to the same crematoriums, I positioned the camera a few feet from each porthole, aligned precisely with the glass, and photographed the light escaping through it. Not through it, more accurately. The alignment was exact. The distance was enough to make looking through the porthole impossible. I could photograph the porthole or I could look through the porthole. I could not do both. I chose the photograph.
This choice is the project's central decision and its central argument. A porthole is a viewing device. It is built into the door for the specific purpose of allowing someone to see what is happening inside. By photographing it rather than using it, I was making the instrument of vision into a subject, treating the means of looking as the thing to be looked at. The result is an image that shows you everything on this side of the door and nothing of what lies beyond it. The light comes through. The event that produces the light stays inside.
What the light comes from is fire transforming a body. This is what Metamorphosis had approached from the public side of the same buildings, from the secular chapels and the corridor leading to the locked door. Ineffable Light approaches the locked door itself and stops. The distance is not a failure of nerve, or not only that. It is a recognition that this is precisely where photography ends. The medium that claims to make the world visible is pointing at the one opening designed for looking and recording only the light that escapes from what cannot be shown.
Bachelard wrote that light works upon the surface of things whereas heat penetrates. The porthole is the precise boundary between those two conditions. Light crosses it in one direction. The heat, the transformation, the fact of the body becoming something else, stays on the other side. The photograph records the light. It cannot record what produces the light. It cannot record the heat.
This is why the title uses a word that belongs to language rather than to vision. Ineffable: beyond expression, beyond what can be said or shown. The light in these images is ineffable not because it is transcendent but because of its origin, because of the specific and irreversible process that generates it. Photography can measure light, fix it, hold it on a surface indefinitely. It cannot say what this light means. It cannot reach through the porthole it is aligned with. It can only record the fact of the gap, the distance that is also a limit, the safe position from which the unbearable can be approached without being entered.
These photographs are made from exactly as close as I could get.
