Annals of Philosophy: Mirrors and Photography

There is an interesting story about mirrors in the science section of today’s New York Times, and when I read it I couldn’t help but think about the relationship, or maybe I should say similarities, between mirrors and photographs.
     I wouldn’t be the first person to equate photos with mirrors. There must be a hundred photo books and exhibitions that have the word “mirror” in the title. The most famous was the landmark 1978 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960,” in which curator John Szarkowski brought the world up to date on a medium that was only beginning to be considered a fine art. As critic Robert Hughes wrote at the time, Szarkowski showed that photography was no longer simply a medium for “witnessing public events.” Szarkowski recognized that photography had become the way we now perceived reality itself. It didn’t capture reality so much as reflect it back in some interesting and perplexing ways, as mirrors do.
      That’s why I was intrigued by the piece about mirrors in the Times. I didn’t realize how perplexing or misleading a reflected image could be. There are lessons in the article that anyone interested in photography—especially the metaphorically inclined—can take to heart.

The Times article, by the inimitable Natalie Angier, notes that scientists have begun using mirrors to explore questions about the way humans perceive the world. Mirrors have proven very valuable in showing how humans decide “what is self and what is other,” and how it “reconstructs the richly three-dimensional quality of the outside world from what is essentially a two-dimensional world.”
    That is something our minds also do when we gaze at still photos.
    The power of the reflected image is powerful. According to Angier, doctors now use mirrors to create reflected images of patients’ limbs and other body parts, thus tricking their brains, in order to treat post-stroke paralysis and phantom-limb syndrome.
    Placing mirrors in offices has been shown to increase productivity by making workers more self-aware. “Physical reflection encourages philosophical self-reflection,” writes Angier. In classrooms with mirrors, students are less likely to cheat.
     But mirrors, like still images, also mislead. When we look into a mirror, what we see is being interpreted by our brains. (Just as we interpret the two-dimensional image of a photograph, I believe.)
     Have you ever looked at a picture of yourself and barely recognized the person staring back? Or, as a photographer, have you ever wondered why people often hate the way they look in your pictures? This phenomenon is explained by one of the experiments that Angier cites. Subjects in this experiment were asked to view pictures of themselves, amid a lineup of “distracter” faces. Participants identified their own portraits much faster when the images were manipulated to be 20-percent more attractive.
     This part is even better: When subjects were shown portraits of themselves that had been manipulated to make them look more attractive, less attractive, or left untouched, they were more likely to call the attractive version the most accurate. Angier calls this “internal photoshoppery,” and it seems to apply only when we look at pictures of ourselves; when asked to look at manipulated and non-manipulated photos of other people, the subjects were more likely to select the unenhanced version as the most accurate.
    “With their capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light,” writes Angier, “mirrors are pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake.” It is important, when looking into mirrors or at pictures, to remember that we are looking not at the real word but at a virtual world, a mere image.—David Schonauer