Familiar Reflections: An Archive Collection of Mirrored Photography

Glamour 7/1/1949. Photograph by John Rawlings.

After the latest batch of Condé Nast summer interns arrived early last month, I performed the annual ritual of showing them through the Archive. They shuffled through a dozen at a time, initially thinking that archives are boring, but quickly learning they can be fun. There is really old stuff!

Before they came, I had been playing with different search terms that would retrieve a set of photographs from across decades and titles (fashion, architecture, food, etc.) Thinking back to some of the early fashion illustrations, I remembered a common device used by many of the illustrators – drawing a model standing in front of a mirror. So I typed “mirror” into the database, and voila, hundreds of records dating back to the 1910s.

As an illustrative or photographic tool, a mirror can be used in a variety of ways. For fashion, it is an easy way to show both sides of a garment at the same time. As Cecil Beaton shows below, reflected self-portraits are a creative step up from the old arms-length “I hope I’m in the frame” shot. For portrait-makers, mirrors are a wonderful way to show two sides of a personality in one picture. The perfectly symmetrical face is a rarity, and a good reflective photo can seem to present two sitters at once.

Finally, there are endless uses of mirrors in novelty or trick shots. Mr. Nast, normally the more austere type, was fond of the carnival photo booth. The first photograph in the set below shows him sitting at a card table with four of his “twins.”

If you’d like to see more mirror photography, check out the more than 23,000 photos posted by 6,000 navel-gazers as part of the Mirror Project @ Flickr.

No Flash? Click here to view this article’s gallery of mirrored photographs.