Feeling Over-Exposed

On the first Friday of every month the various galleries on our island stay open late, and offer wine and little treats to the art-buying public. And though the art-buying public isn't buying much art these days the tradition continues: between the hours of 6 and 8 pm the streets in the center of town are filled with people moving from gallery to gallery, enjoying the latest exhibits.

I try to attend the First Friday gatherings regularly with a couple of artist friends, although my visit was cut a bit short this last weekend because I had agreed to attend a poetry reading at 7; I only made it to two of the galleries this time and will have to explore the others sometime over the month to come. One of my friends was out of town, but the other one and I decided to have dinner together before the gallery walk, and so it was that around 5:00 we were walking along the waterfront, enjoying the views of the marina on our way to the pub. The light was spectacular, and I kept pausing with my camera, but it was almost impossible to get a good shot: the sun was still too high in the sky, and the dynamic range was just too wide for my particular digital camera to take in.

What that means is that I have to choose: if I expose for the light parts of the image, the rest will be too dark and I will lose both detail and color: those intriguing reflections you see in the water here, which show you parts of the boat that don't actually appear in this image, would completely disappear if I exposed for the white at the back of the boat. If I expose for the mid-to-dark parts of the image, however, the whites will be blown out, and I will lose detail and whatever slight variations of color there are in the whites. I usually find there is more to lose if you expose for the light, so I expose for the dark and allow the whites to lose their form: this image, with its lack of detail at the back of the boat, is a perfect example of what happens in cases like that.

So I bring this up because walking through Holy Week is a bit like trying to shoot in bright sunlight: it's very hard to encompass the high contrasts between the triumphant beginning and the slow darkening of Maundy Thursday and the vigil; between the horror of Good Friday and the exultation of Easter. Most people, I think -- the C and E Christians, some call them (as in, they only show up in church on Christmas and Easter) -- tend to expose themselves only to the light parts of this week. I understand that choice -- it's difficult for a lot of folks to find time to attend weekday services. But in making that choice they miss a lot of the rich detail and color of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

In thinking of this I am particularly remembering a Good Friday service spent at tiny Christ Church in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, listening to my friend Linda Strohmier preach. It was the perfect location for a Good Friday service: dark, and cold, made of stone with dark pews and altar and an absolutely extraordinary blessing of stained glass windows (for a virtual tour, click here). But there have been other Good Friday services in much less impressive surroundings that were just as moving -- again, that cafeteria in Sammamish comes to mind, and the year I made a cross for Good Friday out of two-by-fours and huge nails. When we draped it in a black veil it was if all the light went out of the room...

I guess what I'm saying is that I prefer to expose for the darker parts of Holy Week, and I like the reflections and discoveries I make by doing that. I have to confess that it's partly because I don't tend to like crowds very much, so I try to avoid the services where the parking lot is full and people are milling around in the Narthex trying to find seats -- which means I missed the pageantry of Palm Sunday by attending the early service. And I usually miss the craziness of Easter Sunday, choosing instead to attend a Saturday night vigil service (if I can find one). Perhaps what I am saying is that my own soul, like my camera, can't quite encompass the full dynamic range of Holy Week, and so I choose to err on the side of darkness: which means I tend to miss the colors and details that are so much a part of Palm Sunday and Easter.

But the good news is that Easter comes anyway -- even if I don't get all the spicy parts of it. But after the rest of the week, the light of it is almost blinding. So forgive me if I tend to look away, to explore some of the darker corners of it: perhaps I am just protecting myself from the overwhelming power of the light.