INTERIOR LIGHT 2. ON REFLECTION(S)
Reflection is both an exterior optical phenomenon, and a mental process. How can one usefully reflect upon one’s photographic practice? To use a medium fully is to define for one’s self both it’s strengths and it’s limitations. The basic limitation of the photograph, and for me, it’s great strength, is the necessity for subject.The camera must be pointed away from the self towards that aspect of the ‘real’ which currently fascinates. The photograph describes that reality in precise detail but it also transforms it. It is in this tension between description and transformation that, for me, the fascination of photography resides.
To photograph reflections is to complicate, to transform the space. Look for reflections in expected and unexpected places, a mirror, the glass of a framed image, the surface of a plate, the curved surface of a large spoon.
Reflections are everywhere, seek them out see how unsuspected juxtapositions can happen, how the sense of the space shifts.
Curtains reflected in the glass of framed prints on an opposite wall. The out of focus print produces a mottled unexplained texture, an unexplained surface.
In the same space, a self portrait, framed by the reflected curtains and the unexplained out of focus flying shapes of the of the framed image.
An unexpected reflection, I was sorting prints and on the table were a number of acetate print sleeves. I was looking at the reflections in them.
A strange white shape that I could not immediately explain dominated the space. I looked through a camera, slight changes of viewpoint caused the shape shifted, changed. I made a number of exposures. I then realized that the contorted shape was made by my neighbour’s drainpipe!
My personal title ‘Salvador Dali’s Drain Pipe’.
From a series of images moving from inside my room to the outside, then returning from the outside in. The window was rain flecked, the exposure was made when morning light illuminated the interior, the reflection including me and juxtaposing interior and exterior spaces.
Enjoy the search for reflections!
A friend once said to me to photograph reflections is greedy, an attempt to show both what is in front of and what is behind you. Be greedy!
Reflect upon it.
Enjoy and stay safe!