Judith Black - Where the Light Came in

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.