Week 1: Mirrors and Windows reflection post

Looking through a window in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht onto Utrecht itself. A Boat is on the canal in front and further back is a street with tall Dutch houses.
Window onto Utrecht from the Centraal Museum, 2017.

For our first week’s discussion topic in our forum, we were asked to post an image to the forum as an introduction. I chose this one I took in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht with the following:

Hello, I’m Ed and I’m a photographer, designer and illustrator based in York, UK. I have a background in agency work and currently work on data visualisation and internal comms campaigns.

If Windows and Mirrors are a spectrum, my photography work leans heavily towards the window end, literally in many cases as I use windows and doorways as framing devices to peep through. There is a minimal amount of mirroring in my pictures – I rarely put my feelings or emotions into it other than how I edit look and feel.

My visual strategy for images such as this is to capture small moments of quietness such as this layered view into Utrecht itself. The allegory of Plato’s Cave can very much apply to this particular photo as the view is restrictive but the canal and road further towards the back show movement (or shadows) drifting past the viewer, leaving it to their imagination.

Additionally the viewer can also interpret their own religious symbolism through the cross of lights on the left and also the cross formed by the window frame and tree in the centre (none of this was my intention at the time). I do like landscape painters like Caspar David Friedrich (who also hid religious allegory into their work) so this may have been a subliminal influence but again not intentional.

After a discussion with tutor Jesse Alexander about how much feeling and emotion I put into as surely editing and processing requires some emotion and subjectivity I expanded on it further:

I think what I meant more was that if you view windows (as more objective or literal) and mirrors (as more personal or emotive) as a spectrum and split it into quarters or fifths, I’d be on the right quarter end of the diagram below. I’d be the opposite end of someone like Vanessa Fairfax Woods who is more about identity.

Mirrors and Windows spectrum line

I found the above diagram while researching the theme  after I’d already posted but it adds more detail with the words below. Also rather than being two poles of a spectrum you could slide most of those words along that line or even have them take up a segment of the line (this is the data visualisation part of my background kicking in).

Going further from Jesse’s challenge I need to look further into my work to reflect on what I do in my photography:

  • What other painting or photography references either consciously or unconsciously I am using?
  • What other of my photos have mirror / window examples?
  • Can I take more feeling from these images than I’d previously thought?
  • What other metaphors do I know of that can show insight into photography?
  • From a wider perspective, what’s my motivation for photography, what do I want to learn about and how can that help me get a greater understanding of it?

I think that last bullet point is key. Part of the reason for starting this MA course was having spent a long time being ‘the guy with the camera at work’ taking photos for client or company projects – lots of doing and not a lot of thinking about it. Now I want to use this MA to slow down and think about how I’m going to expand my photography more thoughtfully and deliberately.

Diagram showing Doing Photography as a horizontal line with an arrow at the right side. Thinking about Photography is a vertical line with an arrow. An underlined note says More Depth Please.

The rest of those bullet points I’ll return to in a later post.

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