The power of a beam of light

A photo of a soldier in Mosul peering through a barricaded window leads Kelly Grovier to think about the strange intensity of rays that pierce the darkness.

“There’s a certain slant of light”, the American poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “that oppresses”. The lines occurred to me this week after encountering an extraordinary photo taken in Intisar, an embattled neighbourhood in eastern Mosul. The powerful image depicts a soldier engaged in the formidable task of recapturing the northern Iraqi city from so-called Islamic State. Peering tensely through a partially barricaded window, the soldier’s eyes squint to detect the slightest twitch of a concealed sniper or the deadly encroachment of a suicide bomber.

The gentle incline of the soldier’s foreshortened rifle, which directs our gaze from the dead-centre of the photo to an invisible vanishing point somewhere beyond the window frame, clashes with the sharp descent of the beams of daylight that flood into the room. Suspended in a cascade of sloping light, the soldier seems suddenly the imagined narrator of one of the eeriest poems of the past 150 years.

Dickinson did not, needless to say, have 21st-Century IS militants in mind when she composed her lines in 1861. Yet there is something in the poem that uncannily fits the contours of this week’s photo. The poem’s final stanza seems especially prescient:

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

Before encountering this week’s photo from Mosul, my mind had always attached, as a visual counterpart to Dickinson’s spiritual “slant of light”, the filigree shadows and pitched gleam of the dark Dutch interior in A Man in a Room (1627-30), believed to be by a follower of the 17th-Century master Rembrandt van Rijn. Himself a disciple of Caravaggio’s mastery of lightness and darkness, Rembrandt’s ability to alchemise substance from shadow was a defining feature of his genius. Though the figure who is seated at a table in A Man in a Room – his body on the verge of drowning in gloom – may lack the finesse of Rembrandt’s own hand, his unsculpted form has its own power.

Swaddled in shade, the figure dissolves into the half-light of his own meditation as he searches, to use Dickinson’s phrase, for “where the meanings are”. Affecting as that painting is, however, this week’s photo from Iraq is charged with an intensity that eclipses the delicate light of Rembrandt’s protégé, giving Dickinson’s poem a brutal urgency.

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