Where the Light Came in - Judith Black
The most consequential moments are rarely dramatic. What stays with us, what makes us feel truly seen, is often small, domestic, and endlessly repeated. Judith Black’s photographs, made at home in the early 1980s of her four young children and their stepfather, remind us of this simple truth.
In 1980, after a divorce, Judith moved her family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and took a job at the darkroom at MIT. Their home wasn’t grand, but it was theirs, a place to begin again. Not long after settling in, they found a worn old armchair left on the side of the road and gave it a place by the window. It became a spot of rest and quiet theatre, a vantage point from which Judith watched her children grow, day by day, frame by frame.
This new book gathers every photograph she made of that single chair. What begins as cast-off furniture becomes, through her attentive eye, a kind of threshold: a simple thing that holds a whole world. There is a truth here that is easy to overlook, that by staying close to the ordinary, by returning to the same corner of a room, we might learn to see more clearly. And that the measure of a life is so often found not in grand gestures, but in the worn fabric of a chair, the shifting light, the hush of children growing older under our watch.
Where the Light Came In has been carefully designed to feel like an object of devotion; the kind of object a parent might make at home. Each photograph has been silkscreened with a soft gloss varnish, echoing the sheen of prints lovingly pasted into an album. Handwritten notations run through the pages, intimate and unguarded. The book itself is coverless, its exposed binding sewn and held in place with quiet precision, a gesture of care and vulnerability.
"The chair, a curbside find on garbage day, was covered with a swath of dark brown corduroy to hide its tattered arms and worn cushions. It sat by the entryway door and caught brief moments of early morning light from the dusty living room bay window that looked over the alley separating our apartment from our neighbour." - Judith Black
Stanley Barker, 2025
Softcover, 88pp
240 x 170mm
