Academic Exercise in Shading in which the Negative Proved to be Equally as Correct 1975

This diptych by Robert Cumming shows two photographs of a blackboard, each offering a different perspective on a drawing lesson. Cumming’s kind of messing with the idea of visual truth here; he’s having a conversation about how things become images. You can almost feel him setting up the shot, arranging these geometric forms and then diagramming the light, shadow, and angles. In one frame, we get a kind of double negative—a photographic representation of a drawing that itself represents three-dimensional objects. In the other panel, the lighting is reversed, which makes you think again about the representation of volume and space. I love the way the image asks us to consider how we learn to see, and how photography itself shapes our perception. Cumming’s photographs are so funny and dry but full of these slippery ambiguities.