Light Black: the Imaginary Texture of the Real
– Grey! Did I hear you say grey?
– Light black. From pole to pole. (Beckett: Endgame)
Grey, the universal. Or is it black? The grey-scale image makes something conspicuous, something which sight in the service of daily concerns learns to overlook, even though it is always there. That something is sight itself, sight’s own labour upon the real, which – being the only access to it – is at once the condition of possibility and condition of impossibility of that reality.
Sight, it seems, has a mysterious power that turns brute sensations into images much in line with the meanings and aspirations of a mundane life: here a car, there a house, over there a sign post in the setting sun, here and there the shadows of other beings, other gazes. All these have always already been there prior to the gaze of my eye – they are undoubtedly real. Still, the only access to these realities is through a network of meanings socially constructed, communicated by language, and filtered through a spectrum of emotions, that is to say, through an intricate, but invisible interplay of the imaginary.
It is this entanglement of the real and the imaginary in every image perceived that the grey-scale image has such an unparalleled capacity to lay bare. The black-and-white image, which is at once found and fabricated, at once real and imaginary, is hence a natural-artefact. What it reveals is not quite the real, nor is it the imaginary. It is, in Merleau-Ponty's phrase, “the imaginary texture of the real.”
LIGHTBLACK is a project by Dublin-based creator András Jásdi.