Published in 1933, In Praise of Shadows is Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s quiet revolt against the glare. It argues for an art of the half-seen, where value lives in what light withholds as much as in what it reveals. As he puts it, “were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.”
Tanizaki contrasts Japanese taste with the industrial West’s hunger for brightness, polish, and total disclosure. He lingers on things that awaken only in low light, a tarnished silver sake cup that smokes with history, lacquer that catches a wavering candle and turns it into a soft pulse, yokan eaten from a black dish so the room’s darkness seems to dissolve on the tongue, sushi resting inside a persimmon leaf. It reads like a lesson in attention. Not a chase after spectacle, a patient tuning of the senses.
In this view, shadow is not a defect to be corrected. It is a structure, a ritual, a set of choices handed down by time. Light becomes its counterpart, necessary yet dangerous when unrestrained. The two are not a simple fight between good and bad. They are a tension that gives shape to everything else. Shadow grants privacy, ambiguity, silence. It slows the eye. It makes an object dignified by refusing to tell the whole story at once.
What happens when we carry that ethic into creative work today, especially into photography where sensors and screens are trained to flatten the night?
We can protect the dark. Expose for highlight, not for spectacle, and let blacks keep their weight. Let surfaces breathe, choose materials that reward low light, grain, patina, skin that is allowed to be skin. Shape space with absence, not only with fixtures. Give the viewer’s eye a place to rest, then a reason to return. Use reflection as a verb, not a trick, thin, imperfect, human.
We can pace time. Allow stillness inside the frame, long enough for texture to announce itself. Edit hard, if it fits. Resist the reflex to explain everything. Let a corner hold a secret. Trust that a softer signal often travels farther.
We can honor context. Build compositions that invite the surrounding dark to participate, doorways that promise, not billboards that shout. In architecture, in product, in portrait, consider where light stops, since that edge is where character begins.
Tanizaki’s praise is not nostalgia. It is a method, a way to cultivate sensitivity in a world trained to overexpose. Make room for what the eye cannot immediately name, then design the conditions where that quiet can be felt. Shadows are not empty. They are full of decisions.
George Kroustallis // Minorstep