1979 | Salem, Oregon
This picture was taken when my good friend Bernd Reinhardt was just four years old. Since then, he has grown into an astute photographer. After we met a few years ago via a long chain of remarkable happenstance, we became a local two-man tag-team, exchanging experience and inspiration. Bernd had recently been engaged in online critiques with Ben Lifson, forty years after my time with him at CalArts, so care and insight continue to flow through us from that shared source.
I showed this picture to Bernd, and he wondered how people might ‘read’ the large window frame and my own reflection. For me, the window’s corrugated patina is elegant, luminous, an ornament as well as a frame. (I am also fond of the fire department connections, which are nicely-scaled accents complementing the yellow ceramics). Every picture is framed by its own edges, so I think it’s fair game to step back a little more, to see how the world frames itself.
And my appearance suggests to me that the full mass of the large figure inside the window is suspect, that he might be only half-there himself – just look at him holding the reflection of the branch out of the way so he can clean under it; is he a plane-shifter, alternately inhabiting two worlds?
Over a hundred years ago, Eugène Atget made the photographer’s world safe for reflections, and fifty years after that, Lee Friedlander made a small living off his own reflection and shadow. Ambiguity stands the test of time; you could ask an Irish poet.