Mirror Emplacements
Medium-format photography, mirrors
This is an ongoing analog photography series, using mirrors (instead of multiple exposures) to complicate the way land and environment interact with the camera’s point of view. Shown here is a view from my 2024 Open Studio event; I made the frame from salvaged Monterey Cypress.
As Above
I've spent years working with multiple exposures in medium-format film, but this is a new series using single exposures. Drawing from my sculptural experience working with glass and optics, I’m now incorporating mirrors into my photography as a way to access a deeper felt connection with my environment. Mirrors have a long and storied history in philosophy, psychology, physiology, and mythology, from the pool of Narcissus, to Lacan’s mirror stage, to experimental techniques used to ameliorate phantom limb pain. Mirrors also pepper the history of image-making, from handheld obsidian surfaces used by artists to more easily render a landscape to more recent interventions like Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacements, or Olafur Eliasson’s reflective installations. Here, I’m using them to de-familiarize a canonical landscape – the Big Sur coast – hoping to bring the non-human world out of “backdrop” and back into the focus of our awareness.
Sirenum Scopuli
Here, the mirror itself is less visible – it’s placed close to the lens at an almost-parallel angle, and becomes visible only in its distortion of the scene. This steep angle imposes a forced – but again, imperfect – symmetry on an otherwise wholly asymmetrical landscape. It also makes visible the physicality of the mirror itself – the thickness of the glass is what causes the stuttering refracted copies and stretching effects just right of center. The darkness on the right, too, is caused by the drag the glass imposes on the incoming light. The title is the ancient name of the rocks where the sirens lived, luring sailors to their deaths. I picture those rocks like these ones, off the coast of Big Sur: beautiful, alluring, unsettling, dangerous, full of knowledge and magic; difficult to distinguish between soft illusion and hard reality.