Frame Work

Since 2018, I have collected images posted by sellers of used mirrors on eBay. My ever-growing archive has over 1500 images. Weekly, I search “antique mirror” on eBay, and screen capture images that, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s words “awakened an echo” in my body. I estimate that I have reviewed over 2000 thousand listings a week, for over 150 weeks. The collection is filled with poignant glimpses of private lives, optical illusions, self-portraits (knowingly and unknowingly made), still lifes, landscapes and documents of contemporary material culture. The images explore our reluctance and desire to expose ourselves. Every photograph can be read as self-portrait. I view this archive as a study in the phenomenological experience of vision, and by extension, photography. To encounter a photograph is to apprehend it through one’s body. So, this work, in some sense is also autobiographical, presenting a catalog of what images, again in Ponty’s words, my body “welcomed.”