Graham French

Reflections

Artist Statement

The Reflections series was born in the crush of rush hour traffic. I looked up at the jutting towers of glass and steel and found a world refracted within itself. Light cast startling reflections distorted on each surface. In the heart of the city, I had found an improbable echo of my cloudscapes, a strangely fluid and elemental spectacle. I had to shoot it.

The tension between the rigid steel structures impaled by the liquidity of the bent waves of light produced a foreboding sense of instability that the slick mirrored surfaces seek to deny. The faceless facades contained motion and temporality--glass, after all, is liquid and these images only existed for a brief moment in time. As with water, in its various states producing cloudscapes over the ocean, these urban objects became events.

Our earliest mirrors were pools of dark, still water. These buildings, made of objects designed to reflect light, suggest the quiet, menacing power beneath the misleading still surface of water. These mirrors filter and alter light. I placed the camera in a position to capture what is lost and found in the altered reflections.

The distortions also bring to mind the glass of the lens. I am interested in asking the viewers of this series to examine the power dynamics at play: who's behind the glass, who's behind the lens, what can be seen in the reflection?