Viewpoint Jon Bentley
Appreciating the myriad ways that photographers have used mirrors and re ections
Don’t ignore the potential of mirrors. Not for the rst time Mrs Bentley taught me a valuable lesson the other weekend. We were in London visiting the magni cent eighteenth-century Painted Hall in Greenwich. With its ceiling by Sir James Thornhill it is, with some justi cation, referred to as the British Sistine Chapel.
While I was pottering about admiring Sir James’s brushwork, Mrs Bentley had spotted the photographic potential of the mirrors installed so people can get a good view of the masterpiece without craning their necks. By carefully aligning the ceiling with its re ection and the couches, also available for visitors to lie on to help viewing, she created a delightfully surreal view of the space using her venerable iPhone SE.
Mirrors are, of course, an amazing photographic tool. Most obviously they can ease the photographer into their own shots – chance encounters with mirrors helping to create eetingly easy self-portraits without the self-conscious arm of the sel e or the spontaneitysapping need to erect a tripod and engage the self-timer. Vivian Maier made an art out of these mirrored sel e shots. And not just with mirrors per se. She was well used to nding them disguised as shop windows, chrome hubcaps and even ashtrays.
Mirrors can also help you go incognito, disguising the fact that you’re pointing the camera at a subject, and allowing you to capture a more natural expression. With a bit of juggling you can incorporate different angles on a subject in one frame; multiple portraits, or an event and a crowd’s reaction to it, for example.
There’s a whole range of perspective tricks to exploit. Mirrors can make a small space appear bigger while a 45-degree mirror in front of the camera gives an instant worm’s eye view of anything directly above. Pairs of mirrors famously create in nite tunnels of repetition; add more and there’s a whole kaleidoscope of effects to be enjoyed.
The fact that the focusing plane of the re ection is different to the surface itself – actually the same distance behind the mirror as the subject is from it – adds to the other-worldly effect. It’s used to good effect in Jackson Moyles’s image of Glasgow band The Ninth Wave re ected in a cracked mirror, recently featured in BBC Four’s Great British Photography Challenge.
Then there’s all the associations mirrors bring. The glamour and tension of the backstage makeup mirror or the sense of journey embodied in the humble car door mirror. Pieces to camera in these became a bit of a cliché back in my car shooting days but they still convey a feeling of road trip mythology. While the seaside distorting mirrors of old are now a rarity, there are still a great many intriguing re ective surfaces to be found – from blind spot mirrors and Christmas decorations, to kettles and kitchen foil.
So, take a lesson from Mrs B; keep your eyes alert and embrace the power of re ections.