i'll be your mirror

Elizabeth White's I'll Be Your Mirror is a perfect project for contemplating the ability of photography to capture the subject. in I'll Be Your Mirror, one person's face is turned into a reflected diptych. i'm not sure if these are made with a mirror, digitally or both (though i suspect both).

these "portraits" really do make you marvel at the malleability mercureality awesomeness of the human face. in the image above, titled "Chiara," the two versions of the subject look like different people to me, about whom i would ascribe different characteristics and different personalities. and i can only imagine that the "real," unmanipulated Chiara looks completely different again from either of these two people.

here's an excerpt from the project statement from the exhibition at Gallery Lifebomb in Germany:

"We can only view our full appearance by way of external tools- namely mirrors and photographs. This fracture between lived experience and concept of self is the split psychologist Jacques Lacan referred to as "I and the Ideal I", an inherent rupture in the idea of a single essential self... "I'll Be Your Mirror" plays with the history of portraiture and points to the shift occurring in the relationship between photographic image and the referent. The exhibition questions the significance of these trends for the construction of identity by offering split portraits that are neither entirely true nor false. "

well...okay. yes. i'll go there. awesome.

(of course, this I'll Be Your Mirror is not to be confused with the Nan Goldin book/exhibition/film of the same name...or the Velvet Underground song.)