In this aesthetic of the indistinct (In’ei) space emerges from shadows, gloom and darkness (yami) and it highlights the importance of dim light and shadow in the traditional Japanese lifestyle. Tanizaki, writing in the 1930s, was concerned about the rapid loss of pre-modern Japanese aesthetics and mode of living in the face of Westernization and modernization. In Praise of Shadows was his way of questioning modern society and reminding his Japanese readers of the importance of appreciating the beauty of subtle and subdued light and the author reflects almost melancholically about this aesthetic which he judges will pass with his generation.
But it need not. Tanizaki’s world has itself slipped mostly into history’s darkness, the pre-modern fragment of the aesthetic of dim light (In’ei) can be repurposed in photography, as its conceptual core is a dialectic of light and shadow. If the aesthetic sensibility of pre-modern Japan has now been blasted into fragments by the glitz of Ginza and neon urbanism’s garish color, the aesthetic category of the indistinct (In’ei) still has relevance, as can be seen in the seascape below:

Photography is just at home in the dim, shadowy or subdued light (In’ei) world as it is in the clear and distinct world of bright light that was celebrated as being unique to Australia — foundational Australian light — in the early twentieth century. In’ei or the indistinct (vague and obscure) can be associated with a luminous darkness (yūgen) and its idea of hidden depths.
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