Reduce. Reduce in order to get down to the essence, to the thing itself. Clear a space to record something elusive. But not something hidden, as you might suppose; reduce, rather, in order to document the everyday, the omnipresent, the “little bit too self-evident”—namely light itself. “Light” was the infant Erika Blumenfeld’s first word, as it was literally the last word of Wilhelm von Goethe, another investigator of that phenomenon. “Blumen-feld”: literally “field in bloom”—a gift of sunlight.

Blumenfeld takes nothing for granted. In all innocence she asks “what do we actually see when we observe a sunset? Or when we look east? Have captured ‘east’ when we photograph light coming at us from the east?” What, she wants to know, does a photograph do exactly?

In modernity, the aesthetic fixation on light can be traced back to the Impressionists and Cézanne, but that French tradition marries American practices. Blumenfeld aims to depict what William Carlos Williams conjured in “The Red Wheelbarrow”—the nakedness of things appearing for the first time, and appearance as an end in itself. She is after the particular look of a March sunrise at six a.m. that Wallace Stevens invokes in his poem “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” Blumenfeld’s work resonates with Robert Irwin’s early disks, with Dan Flavin’s florescent tubes, and most of all with James Turrell’s light pieces.