Karien Vandekerkhove wrote a letter to The Light. It resulted in a book as a personal encounter with ‘the traces light leaves’, and is a unique tribute to her father. Philip Ball’s text accompanies a series of colour photographs that foster thoughtful perspectives on, as Fernando Pessoa says, ‘The dream is to see the invisible forms’.
“That’s what I see in these photographs too: not simply a play of light on and through matter, but a sense of absence, of things and people departed, leaving behind ethereal traces not just in the arrangements of objects – tables, bottles, glasses, apples – but in the effects those manipulations of the visible have on the ethereal. It’s all very ordinary until we stop and notice how rich and subtle these effects are. Mostly that is, after all, how life is. These images are a form of remembrance.”
“What I’m saying is that, if Vandekerkhove’s images force us to think about things that are “not really there”, the response might be to ask: not really where?”