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Reflections Upon The Mirror As A Medium
1. Like a ball court: the whole external reality bounces upon the polished or mercury coated material, on that enigmatic surface where the very nature of all mirrors clearly resides. A magnet of images or unknown realities. The mirror attracts and then expels them to the outer universe, to the point from where the eye sees them. The mirror does not want things, it does not keep them for itself. It is not friendly, kind, or a hoarder: it is a 'repellent' entity. In spite of all appearances, it is not penetrable, it is hard and cold. For that reason Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland was so fantastic and the journey of The Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau so chimeric. What is the mirror's beyond is my here and now. It always returns the darts and the goads, the smiles and frightening masks with implacable precision. Everything you throw at it tends to turn into a visual insult for you who are looking at it 2. The mirror is not unlimited. It is a fact that it has sometimes served as a metaphor for things which are really infinite (e.g. the discourse on nature as a 'mirror reflection' of divinity), but there is really no mirror without edges. Above and below, to the right and left: whether it is round or oval, or has the uncertain edges which characterise broken glass, mirrors have the same problems of area and surface as painting or conventional photography. What is reflected, therefore, is always a fragment of the world. From this it is deduced that all mirrors require a strategy of position (where they are placed) and another, combined one, of contemplation (who is looking at it, and from where). Let us then add chronological and atmospheric time also, as not at all hours of the day is there that light without which mirrors cannot come to life... 3. And the fact is that, like Goethe before he died, the mirror also appears to demand "light, more light". It is enemy of the night and historic brother of the sun, with whose iconography its traditional circular and oval shape was assimilated. This perfect bounce back of the luminous ball (let us call it that) has allowed us to identify the mirror with the very source of light itself. Is not the word 'reflector' a synonym of torch or headlight? This peculiarity has not prevented an interesting flirtation with the poetics of shadows: let us think of the mirrors in Tenebrist painting, not very abundant but of great poetic interest. Caravaggio's Narcissus (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica), for example, contemplates his face in a dark pool, as if catching a glimpse of something which seems to belong more to the night-time dreaming of the internal conscience than the bright world of wakefulness; it is surely no coincidence that the so-called 'black mirrors' were fairly popular in Baroque painting; in his Penitent Magdalen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Georges de la Tour substituted the traditional mirror of vanquished vanity for the crystalline glass which contains the oil of the lit wick, and on whose surface the book and the whip of the disciplines are reflected; something more conventional is the version of the Musée des Beaux Arts in Besançon in which Mary Magdalen appears contemplating the reflection of the skull in a small mirror with a wooden frame. In both cases all the lighting comes from a poor candle. The night, always on the verge of fading. In these and other examples of the same artistic trend there is no frame, no clear limit for the light, and that explains the fact that we are in a universe which is relatively impermeable to the mirror.
4. We should recognise clearly that the mirror, as a reflector
of light, demands a background, an environment, an extra-frame of
shadow, matt or neutral. A light receiver in any case. Something
opaque. This obvious fact (apart from others we shall be mentioning)
determines the reasons for which photography has been inexorably
positioned to tackle the question of mirrors in an inevitable and
obsessive way. In effect, if we think of the mirror as a 'medium'
(and not just as an element of furniture or a mere object), we can
establish its close similarity with the photographic medium. Each,
in a first approach, could be considered as a metaphor of the other:
photography is like a mirror and vice versa. The permanence of the
photographic image reflects the fleetingness of life, but the image
seen in the mirror already immortalises in some way (framing and
isolating) the heterogeneous and changing quality of reality. The
mirror, therefore, (this we already knew about photography) is not
crude reality either, but a kind of representation. (…)
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