Penumbra, a 56-page, 20 cm x 15 cm soft-cover book issued in a limited edition of ten copies in 2025, was created using a combination of commercial software designed for the creation of family photograph albums, the editing functions of my Macintosh computer and Adobe image-editing software. The title comes, in part, from the assertion made by political analyst William A. Galston that “…fear has a penumbra of anxiety—a generalized sense of a world filled with dangers that are hard to anticipate and even harder to control.” Continually on my mind as I created this book was the postulation Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset put forth in his Meditations on Quijote “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo,” and his framing of freedom as “being free within a given fate.” Penumbra is a visual exploration of the varying circumstances and fates of people around the world and the efforts they make to survive, overcome, or exploit them.
The fragments of stills from Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel that appear at various points in Penumbra conjure up the sensation of being trapped in situations that defy logic and reason. The book also contains visual references to various other films and art forms. The Irish artist Phoebe Traquair calmly sketches out an array of graphic images attesting to human ingenuity that include avant-garde musical scores, board games, diagrams of an ancient place in Knossos, Greece, and plans for a bomb shelter; the dog peeping anxiously from some sort of cave recalls another that Goya painted in a similar setting; Jean-Étienne Liotard’s Chocolate Girl makes a phantom appearance in a bomb shelter; Ernest Hemingway strides down the hallway of the Cuban Capital Building in Havana toward an Ana Mendieta robed completely in white; and Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso gives an impromptu performance in a Syrian prison. On other pages, Julia Pirotte, Marta Astfalck-Vietz, and Anastasia Romanov take photographic self-portraits.
Ahoo Daryaei, the university student who defied the Iranian morality police by stripping down to her underwear in public, wanders endlessly throughout the book and on one page crosses paths with Mahsa Amini, the young woman whose death in police custody triggered major protests in Iran. So does Vladimir Putin, who informs a pair of Russian soldiers playing a piano on the streets of Breslau in 1945 and the fictitious boy hero of Andrei Tarkowski’s film Ivan’s Childhood about the latest feats of the Russian army. A woman who pitched a tent in a Kyiv metro station wakes up the next morning in another metro station in Moscow surrounded by a strange cast of characters that includes the “shaman” who participated in the assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, the de-posed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his family, and Vladimir Putin posing for photo ops with Robert Fico, Xi Jinping, and Alexsandr Lukashenko. On another page, a distracted Shamima Begum (a British teenager who fled her family home in London to join the Islamic revolution and has ended up stateless in a refugee camp in Northern Syria) may or may not be listening to the chatter of an anonymous girl walking beside her in a civil war-era bomb shelter in southern Spain that curiously functions as a Horn & Hardart automat as well. The many others who also populate this book include refugees from conflict zones in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, people trapped in war zones, protesters, human rights workers, school children, U.S. secret service agents, journalists, athletes, soldiers, border police, a political assassin, a male actor playing a female role in a work by Shakespeare, and a slave in the American South. Some individuals one might expect to be included in this book, have not been. Given that they are literally everywhere else twenty-four hours a day, I wasn’t inclined to give them more space, although anyone paging through the book will intuit their contribution to the shadow referenced in the title.
This book, which also incorporates various types of social media material that range from memes and tweets to bizarrely photoshopped photographs, reflects the geopolitical and social terrain on which it has been created: a milieu in which the distribution of images is constant, immediate, and often indiscriminate, and events that have taken place at different points in time often take on the appearance of occurring simultaneously. For those in-terested in having more information about the people who share space in Penumbra, each copy of the book is accompanied by a list of individuals on each page that I have been able to identify.
The image of a white horse jumping, which is repeated throughout the book, is a more personal reference to a childhood memory of a runaway horse jumping over the hood of my mother’s moving car and avoiding contact with the windshield by only a few inches. For a few years after relocating to Spain in 2000, I occasionally gave private English lessons and used the image of a jumping horse to explain the many possible meanings of “over,” a concept that Spaniards have trouble navigating. Suggesting that they visualize the arched trajectory of a horse clearing a barrier helped them understand the variations in meaning of the word in sentences such as “when the war is over,” “let’s talk it over,” “we keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results,” and “Don’t worry. You’ll get over it.” The horse (and rider) in Penumbra suggest all of these concepts as well as being a metaphor for flight and escape.
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