The Woman in the Light, Harlem, New York. 1980.
“Photographs are nominally related to life as we know it, even as they are clearly not life itself. In the best cases, a photograph can elevate the
(...) experience of mundane everyday circumstance and transform it into an entirely new experience that both acknowledges and transcends what was there. And so it is with this photograph that I came to call The Woman in the Light. It was made in Harlem, New York, in 1980, in the kitchen of two friends (not these two) during a time when I religiously carried my small 35 mm camera with me at all times. What the woman in the photograph is doing is incidental to the picture you see, since she never knowingly participated in that moment, except by accident. She could be singing, praying, or lost in momentary reverie. All would be true, yet none of them are.”
- Dawoud Bey
Copyright © Dawoud Bey
