You are my mirror

Nowadays photographs have lost their physical substance. Whether good, bad or indifferent, photographs in digital form today are crowded in a virtually unlimited online waiting room. They wait there for the day of their completion, to become visible in the daylight, to regain a body. As contradictory as the choice of the medium may seem, the online exhibition “You’re My Mirror” attempts through a virtual setting to invest these ghostly images with a body and simultaneously to detect the kind of relationship we actually have with them today. An example of this is given by six women photographers, as they compel us to confront the persons they photographed. Children, teens and young women, pose for the camera lens, look at the photographer behind the camera and through them they stare at us. One would expect that the contemporary familiarity with photography, would have eliminated all traces of “pose” at the crucial moment that their photograph
was taken. This does not seem to happen. In the hands of these artists the magical power of the mirror appears to be flourishing again. How do I look? What do I look like? Do I look as I think I am? Do others see me as I see myself? These are all questions that we hold within us from our first encounter with the image of ourselves, the first time we perceived our own reflection in a mirror. It is since then that we seek to reconstruct a confused, incomplete picture of ourselves through the images that mirrors return to us, through the eyes that are staring at us and every person or object that we desire or fear.

Costis Antoniadis