Judith Black

Where the Light Came in

Name: Where the Light Came in
Brand: Judith Black
SKU: Wherethelightcamein
Price: 36.00 GBP
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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

About the Artist

Judith Black has spent more than four decades photographing the life that unfolded around her in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she has lived since 1979. Working with a large format camera and Polaroid Type 55 film, she built a body of work centred on the domestic world, turning the days and years of raising a family into a sustained photographic record that is both personal and disarmingly frank.
Born in Salina, Kansas in 1945 and raised in Illinois, Black trained as a photographer at MIT, completing a Master of Science in Visual Studies in 1981. It was there that she understood her strongest subject was close at hand: her four children, her partner, and the shifting landscape of their daily lives. The pictures carry a painter’s sense of composition and light, shaped by her early background in drawing and printmaking, and an instinct for the small gestures that reveal how a family holds together and comes apart over time.
Black taught photography at Wellesley College for twenty five years, where she led the programme with a quiet rigour. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and became part of a generation of photographers who treated the domestic interior with a new seriousness, recognising it as a place filled with emotional and visual complexity. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad, and is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Harvard Art Museums, the Polaroid International Collection, the Rose Art Museum, and the Davis Museum at Wellesley.
Her first book, Pleasant Street, published by STANLEY/BARKER in 2020, gathered photographs made between 1979 and 1994 and was shortlisted for the Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award. A second book, Vacation, followed in 2021. Both chart the evolving shape of family life, with all the tenderness, difficulty and strangeness that come with it.