the tabula rasa. This is radical empiricism. No composing, no theatricality, no fanfares needed. Not ideas about the thing ….

As it happens, Blumenfeld’s reductive practice addresses not just the phenomenon we call light. She also returns to the rudiments of photography: light and a recording surface. You couldn’t make a picture with any less. But such minimalism yields a kind of plenitude by directly exposing what is.

How is one to document a phenomenon like light that has no inherent shape or body? Blumenfeld’s solution lay in the problem itself. She began, inadvertently, with light’s fluid, nomadic quality: that it finds its way through cracks, that it can penetrate the camera obscura. Testing a camera one day she found that light had leaked inside and exposed her film. This accident proved to be no accident but her point of departure. Ever since, in all its guises, her work has repeated this trouvaille, this discovery.