POP 1 (1) pp.

101107 Intellect Limited 2010

Philosophy of Photography
Volume 1 Number 1
2010 Intellect Ltd Photoworks. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.101/7

RICHARD PAUL

On reflection
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
(Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire)
The protagonist of Richard Princes short story The Perfect Tense has an aversion not only to mirrors but to any reflective surfaces. He has no mirrors in his apartment, no objects that cannot be
rendered dull, and avoids the darkened glass of windows. The possible reminder of ugliness or
deformity does not generate this eisoptrophobia, quite the opposite in fact. In appearance, he is the
ideal man incarnate, who literally stops traffic. He is an image made real, a model reminiscent of
Princes own appropriated images of men from advertisements: upright, flanked by submissive
women, looking determinedly into the middle distance. The constant whispers, pointing etc., make
him feel vulnerable, fearing a possible lynch mob free-for-all.
How tormented would this character feel in the night-time incarnation of Philip Johnsons
Glass House? By day this house has the double effect of fulfilling a desire for closeness to nature
and the absorbed contemplation of it. The occupant can admire the view framed and rendered
picturesque by its huge glass walls, whilst contemplating the fact of being able to survey this

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landscape as their property. In the daytime they are free from prying eyes but, by night, artificial
light renders the walls mirror-like, and any attempt to view the exterior is masked by the occupants self-reflection.
In Dan Grahams Kammerspiel (1982) Jeff Wall draws out the vampiric resonances of this scenario. The sole daytime occupant (the house was designed for one) is virtually invisible by dint of the
reflective exterior of the glass walls. At night, when the house is artificially lit, the occupant becomes
an isolated figure on a stage set, constantly confronted by reflective surfaces that obscure the view,
engender vulnerability and, perhaps, provoke an irrational fear of what lurks in the dark. The Glass
House, with its necessary seclusion and consequent power-protected openness, Wall attests, has
parallels with the aristocratic retreat, but it also evokes the abandoned crypts of Gothic tales.
The myth of the vampire symbolizes the excess generated by a society dedicated to transparency
through science and rationality, to total understanding without recourse to magical thinking. But it
also registers an anxiety that the feudal system of the old order has refused to die and that modernity
is built around an evil core.
Take the symbol of corporate power, the glass skyscraper. It is an inversion of its architects original intent: a monument to the modern, open society, opposed to the aristocratic and religious opacities of old. Its re-evaluation in the light of the collapse of associated revolutionary movements reveals
it to be a monument to technological and hierarchical control. The skyscraper rises up vertiginously
and impersonally, physically and mentally dominating the-man-in-the-street. There is no transparency, only reflection. The executive, high up in his glass box, is as invisible as his alter ego in the
glasshouse and can survey the city in a form of panoptic surveillance that is the age-old privilege of
power. The glass skyscraper is, of course, home to the corporation, which is as inscrutable as its home.
Its executive is expendable and of course metaphorically faceless.
And what of Princes ideal but anxious man? His true state is photographic, which is why his
incarnation is so problematic. As a model without context, he lacks subjectivity. He is the ideal
stand-in or extra. Like the vampire, he is a fiction, a symptom of malaise. His function is to induce
desire, but he is empty, soulless.
***
Photographers (particularly studio photographers) find reflective surfaces problematic. They have the
potential to reveal the construction of the image, its fictional status. But reflective surfaces are the sirens
of the commodity image and a vast range of products are made or finished with them. In the past, photographers resorted, like Princes protagonist, to rendering shiny surfaces matt (using dulling spray) but
this changed the nature of the product depicted. For instance, a stainless steel product may have a
brushed or chrome finish but the use of dulling spray would render the chrome brushed. Photographers

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On reection

came up with ingenious ways of combining the bright rectangular reflection of the softbox with the
blackness of the studio and polystyrene or card reflectors. This produced pleasing graphic shapes that
delineated the volume of photographed objects and avoided such problems. There was (and is) a pleasure in the production of such reflections that reveal the construction of the image, but in a manner that
is, to the untrained eye, essentially indecipherable, abstract and effectively invisible.
Narrative in advertising is strictly controlled, and requires the blank slate of newness. Another
problem with reflective surfaces is that any mark or flaw is highlighted as an imperfection that
detracts from the commoditys newness.
***
Consider the mirror, particularly the round bathroom mirror the ne plus ultra of reflective surfaces.
Reflecting the dark studio, it is a black circle in the picture. It is faintly chilling, evidencing the images
fiction, its lack of an outside and invoking the vampires soulless inability to be reflected in its surface:
an absence that is death. One could read this absence as a return of the transcendent blackness
found in the work of the Spanish still life painter and lay Carthusian monk, Juan Snchez Cotn,
whose most famous painting, Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (1602), depicts comestibles
hanging by strings in a chilled pantry. Hanging these things separately delayed the onset of their
decay, but it also allowed Cotn to describe a three dimensional parabola with their forms. Not only
did he want to suggest that God can be found in the contemplation of quotidian nature, but also in
the sublime geometry of their positioning against a black infinity of background. The transcendence
evoked by Cotn is typical of Catholic painting, and stands in contrast to the later Dutch vanitas,
which celebrated worldly goods whilst moralizing on the inevitability of death and its levelling characteristics. There is no transcendence afforded in these later works, as Calvin pronounced: We are all
condemned by the Fall and our depravity to inhabit a material world that can never be transcended;
and images will not help us escape this fate.
At the heart of Dutch still life painting of this period is a very modern anxiety concerning consumption. The seasonal, pre-industrial cycle of scarcity and plenty was replaced by the year-round
surplus facilitated by proto-capitalist trade. In the early to mid-seventeenth-century, the Dutch
became the wealthiest nation on earth. Still lives by Willem Claesz Heda depict knocked-over pitchers and spilled and smashed glasses, the debris of half-consumed food lies scattered on plates that sit
precariously close to the edge of the table. In these paintings, the quality craftsmanship of the tableware contrasts with signs of indiscriminate and avaricious consumption. Only the beautifully produced painting can restore balance.
The glasshouse can be seen as the epitome of modern[ist] reaction to the embarrassment of overproduction and consumption inaugurated by capitalist industrialization. Unlike the Wunderkammer

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Richard Paul

that was the Victorian abode, the glasshouse is stripped, the uber example of the modernist interior
that Norman Bryson describes in Looking at the Overlooked as: carving out from the general profusion
a secluded emptiness that marks an escape from the teeming and seething pool of commodities
(Bryson 1990: 97). The occupant of the glasshouse has a disdain for the outcome of perpetual growth.
For the contemporary product photographer, generating such associations is verboten. The standard convention in depicting the bathroom mirror (which, in the glass house, is situated in the private area, screened from view) is to contrive a reflection that is a spectral grey graduation. In the
1968 Mbel furniture catalogue, the mirror in the set for bedroom model Birgit is completely black,
apart from the reflection of an orange vase directly in front of it.

References
Bryson, Norman. (1990), Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, London:
Reaktion Books.
Prince, Richard. (1987 ), The Perfect Tense in Blasted Allegories, Brian Wallis (ed.), New York: New
Museum of Contemporary Art.

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On reection

Mbel furniture catalogue, Birgit, 1968.

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Richard Paul

Richard Paul, Auberfin 2 (left), Spheres (right).

Richard Paul, Auberfin 2 (left), Spheres (right).

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On reection

Richard Paul, Saltgrinder 2 (left), Renaissance 1 (right).

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