In her poem “There’s a certain Slant of light (258),” Emily Dickinson invokes the weightless “heft” of a beam of winter light—acutely slanted, knifelike, due to the sun’s low angle in the sky. This light, she writes, is “An imperial affliction/ Sent us of the Air -”— an ominous force capable of marking both the landscape and the psyche while paradoxically leaving nary a “scar.”1 Here, Dickinson juxtaposes the intangibility of light with its elemental ability to function as a conduit for somatic transformation. A touch of light, or its absence, can bestow life, growth, or death. It can also alchemize a fleeting image into a permanent one. In this vein, Dickinson’s poem is inherently photographic: Her words apprehend a transient choreography of light, leaving it indelibly burned to the page.
This poem always comes to mind when I consider the photographs of Uta Barth, who, while digressing from Dickinson’s focus on light as a source of darkness, echoes the poet’s incantation of light as a phantom mark-maker.
