The Shadows Know

I almost always take photos of technicolor skies. The more outlandish the hues, the more likely I am to click away and hoard such images. But every once in a blue moon, I turn to black and white.

It has taken more than a decade for me to be able to face sorting out family belongings kept in sealed boxes as I have moved from place to place. I’ve only recently discovered some taxi-cab-yellow Kodak boxes my husband must have kept since taking a photography class as a teenager. I found contact sheets and black and white prints he must have developed himself. Color prints, at the time, were much more involved and costly than they are in the current Century.

Fittingly, his images are haunting.

Almost of them, like mine, are of inanimate objects. Glass, and possibly metal, in sometimes unrecognizable detail. Between his photos of bullet glass and a row of wine glass sentinels is what looks like a section of a sheet metal sculpture. Or perhaps it was taken inside a Lilliputian circus tent? Or is that an alien’s shadow?

Because I have no idea what lay outside his frame, I can only guess.

There were also many of his trademark photos of wide open spaces. I know some were taken at “World’s End,” in Hingham, Massachusetts. Another print features unusual shadows seeming to overwhelm old evergreens. As with most of my photographs, human beings do not intrude upon the sights he captured.

Two trees appear to list in complete synchronicity. The light appears layered, but no human shadow is cast where one would expect to find the photographer. It is a mystery what could have cast the twin-peaked shadow that encompasses the whole of the smaller tree. (Squint slightly, and we pareidoliacs can see the shadow of an enormous Monty Pythonesque angry rabbit eying that wee tree.)

My very first phone photo was of the geometrically patched road beneath my feet in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Earlier this week, a nearly full blue moon made itself known at dusk, rising through a thin, dense cloud bank. So my lastest photo, too, was both black and white and full-color, with its own subtle, quiet magic.