White as a Defining Feature
Contributors' Picks from Around the WorldPublished in X-Ray Magazine
Issue 132, April, 2025
Text and Photos by Michael Rothschild
White in the visual arts is often an absence. Negative space or blown out highlights. It rarely acts as a defining feature of an image – always a frame, never the subject. But it can be powerful when balanced against detail, contrast and color.
Figure 1 uses bright white bubbles to tell the story of a ripping current as divers cling to the anchor line, giving this still photo life and animation. Figure 2 sets the ascending spearhunter against the white circle of Snell’s window, made by the bright New Jersey sky above the surface. In figure 3 the white bone of the huge skull means time – the years of bleaching since the whaling industry of Newfoundland shut down. And the white in figure 4 is a visitor from the Arctic, the bright ice of a massive berg drifting south to melt in warmer waters. But not before one lucky diver got to run his hand over its rippled walls.
Figure 1 uses bright white bubbles to tell the story of a ripping current as divers cling to the anchor line, giving this still photo life and animation. Figure 2 sets the ascending spearhunter against the white circle of Snell’s window, made by the bright New Jersey sky above the surface. In figure 3 the white bone of the huge skull means time – the years of bleaching since the whaling industry of Newfoundland shut down. And the white in figure 4 is a visitor from the Arctic, the bright ice of a massive berg drifting south to melt in warmer waters. But not before one lucky diver got to run his hand over its rippled walls.
