Some background about my Mirror Images

In my professional photography career, my specialties were fashion and portraits.  Yet I’ve always been fascinated by unusual architecture.  Especially from my two favorite  architects, Santiago Calatrava and the late Zaha Hadid.  In the 1990s I changed my career focus to graphic design, and I think my “inner graphic designer” is what drives these images.

I’ve been creating mirror images of buildings since the 1970s.  I started back in the days of film and chemicals. I would make a print with the enlarger, then flip the negative over and and make another “backwards” print. Using an Exacto knife, I’d cut across each print so specific sections would line up exactly when butted together, creating a new image out of the two. 

Along the way I’ve come to realize that I have a knack for seeing the mirror possibilities in photos that hardly seem, at first glance, to be anything more than their original selves.

Sometimes it is a very straight forward process, just butt the reverse images against each other, as in this "film and paper" photo from almost 50 years ago:

With some images, they need to be cut at an odd angle (not just left right or top bottom). Back in the day this would be a time consuming process, trimming at various places and then hoping they would work together. Obviously, computers and Photoshop make this less of an ordeal.

About the only Photoshop work I do, beyond the trimming and aligning, is to enhance the existing colors or perhaps reverse the colors (so blue becomes orange and orange becomes blue, for example). I think exaggerating the colors adds to the element of graphic design. Very occasionally I’ll remove distracting background elements as well.