I read this yesterday and found it worth sharing. At first it might seem that the following has very little with photography. I think it does. The moral of the story for me is - don’t make images that are just mirrors of reality.
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Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face, there’s nothing more sinister.
Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
Fernando Pessoa
There is something unspeakably tragic in the notion of a man bending toward his reflection, the spine curved in an attitude of sin, as if the very act of self-contemplation were a trespass against the order of the world. Pessoa’s words vibrate with the purity of a forgotten law: that the face, like the soul, was never meant to be fully known by its owner.
Before mirrors were born, one could live with a blessed vagueness, one’s visage a rumor, an assumption traced in the eyes of others. The shepherd, the sailor, the lover, each bore a secret anonymity, a divine uncertainty. But once man discovered his own image, once he dared to cup his face in the cold glass of his invention, something irreversible occurred. He became visible to himself, and therefore, divided.
The mirror, that shimmering traitor, offered a counterfeit eternity. It whispered: Behold, this is you. Yet the self it showed was mute. And since that first poisonous glance, humanity has been rehearsing its own disappearance, perfecting the art of mistaking surface for soul.
There is, in every mirror, a subtle violence: the silent theft of mystery. In its sterile brightness, the self is stripped, flattened, embalmed. Mirrors do not reflect, they imprison. They hold the living face as butterflies are held between panes of glass, forever pinned in place, trembling under the light.
Imagine a world returned to Pessoa’s mercy, a world without mirrors. Faces known only through touch, through the soft geography of another’s hand. A world where vanity has no surface, and beauty no proof. Would we not, perhaps, regain the forgotten art of feeling ourselves instead of seeing ourselves?
Perhaps the truest reflection of man is not in glass or water but in the gaze of another being, fleeting, uncertain, alive.
And so I ask you, reader:
if tomorrow all mirrors were to vanish, would you still recognize yourself in the eyes of those who love you?
Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova
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