Contre-Jour

by practicalspactical

Contre-jour, French for ‘against daylight’, refers to photographs taken when the camera is pointing directly toward a source of light. An alternative term is backlighting.[1][2]
Contre-jour produces backlighting of the subject. This effect usually hides details, causes a stronger contrast between light and dark, creates silhouettes and emphasizes lines and shapes. The sun, or other light source, is often seen as either a bright spot or as a strong glare behind the subject.[2] Fill light may be used to illuminate the side of the subject facing toward the camera. Silhouetting occurs when there is a lighting ratio of 16:1 or more; at lower ratios such as 8:1 the result is instead called low-key lighting.[citation needed]

When we look into the sun, the light obscures details but emphasizes form. If we take light to be awareness, knowledge, the totality of existence, by turning towards it, by allowing that totality to fill our awareness and backlight the mode of being, the details of being are obscured, but the form of being is revealed — 

——
Pynchon’s Themes

Conflicts between 

Utopia / Totalitarianism
Counterculture / Hegemony
Anarchism / Corporatism
Nature / Techne
Eros / Thanatos
Slaves / Masters 
Entropy / Order 

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My theme: The Form of Being, the Light Beyond; 

Reflections on the theme: 
One question is when and where the spirit sang to me, which was a) in school, when I had lots of time, and b) when I was sad, and lonely; 

still — I prefer to think that any causation between the depression and the word was tangentional, or that, in truth, there was some third, secret, cause. Even in the chain of causation, we may be fooled by post-hoc fallacies and miss the middle steps that served as the true causes of action — 

so there — what if it was the solitariness and the contemplation of the frame that comes with unhappiness, a desire to understand the condition — trapped in the head, I became one with the head, I came to explore the head, perhaps hoping, that if I sketched the head, if I mapped the Res Interna, I could master it and tame it — 

I have thought of depression as an ocean, as a boat on stormy seas — the record then was a plumbing of water — 

and yet answer came and with it what – not much – perhaps it was also shouting — 

Perhaps, if all we are is thought, and thought is fleeting, and there is no other to bear witness to such thought, the whole thing disapates and disintegrates – without others, there is little of our selves to hold on to — the writing became a staff to lean on, to keep my balance — to keep the mind and self from fading away — 

what does that mean when the writing was replaced by the love an other? [that too? what of the fact that I was in relationship during that time, but in a relationship where some questions could not be answered, or could not be answered to any satisfaction?] 

but prior question being, the was the love & presence of the other, the being-with, was that the same staff, the same cane, the same standing that kept me together, made me, me, gave self to thought – & what if it was wrong-self, or different-self, 

My cri di coer says that no, it was right-self, it was true-self — 

right and wrong – are they useful? Who is I? What is the I? 

The permanence & the impermanence of identity — the reality of change — if as the nihilist philosophers suggest, our identities are illusions, contingent things, then in fact, change should come easy — change the impulses, change the stimuli, and you change the outcome — 

or in other words, change the weather, change the water. 

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