Some weeks ago I took pictures of two windows reflecting the windows of my house which in turn reflected the windows across the street. As each of those windows is quite an imprecise plane, their mutual reflections bouncing back and forth are increasingly distorted and skewed. These pictures with their reflected overlays reminded me of two older pictures which I took in a similar constellation with mutual reflections between the windows of two houses. Putting these old and new pictures together, I have started to enjoy them as a panel, showing similar moments, separated by eight years, occurring once in Munich and once in Oxford. As innocent as these pictures are, they show some differences between Germany and England, in the walls, the window types, and most importantly, the light.
Cropping away the surrounding walls (which remain visible as reflection) I hope to draw the viewer into the zig-zag of mutual reflections such that the viewer is loosing orientation on the position of the windows involved and on how these reflections have built up. I like the idea that these reflections provide a perspective that is ambiguous and needs interpretation. While these reflections establish — like any other perspective — only insights into something preexisting, they are not obvious and quite unstable: Moving the camera for a couple of centimeters would immediately break their composition. Thus, following Bergsonian terms, they are concrete and real, since they only need to be seen, but they are also virtual, since they require actualization in terms of a picture to manifest themselves.
In any case, it’s just four pictures.
