Downside Up (On Reflections #2)

 

(Bamboo Poles: The first thing heaving into sight when I turned to this street was the stack of bamboo poles which blocked part of the road. Looking up, I noticed that a bamboo scaffolding was being built for the building undergoing refurbishment. How to tell the story was the question I had to solve. The scene was too wide to be covered by my GX200's 24mm lens and too contrasty to be reproduced in the final image. After walking the scene, I paused by a car and calculated that using the reflection of the building on the windscreen was the best solution. Now, from the image, viewers see the bamboo poles blocking the road section between the car and the shops and being used for making the scaffolding. This is the story I wished to convey)

There is a story about the story of an American missionary which took place in Brazil. One day, the missionary attended a meeting in a Brazilian church which posted a big map of the world upside down on the wall. The puzzled missionary made a well-intentioned enquiry to the church leader and the answer given to him was a revolutionary one, "That's your usual way of interpreting the world map. Who says that the orientation looks right only with the US is on top and Brazil at the bottom? If you fly to the space and look, there are lots of ways to see the right orientations of the world. And we're just putting the downside up, not the upside down."

(Downside Up or Upside Down? -- When I checked out the photo at home, an idea struck me. Since the reflection showed an inverted image of the building. So I rotated it upward with a PP software to make the orientation "right". The rotated image seems more engaging. Is it downside up or upside down? The emphasis becomes more on the building than on the bamboo poles. This is a different story, a more interesting one to me)

An intriguing aspect of reflections is that they challenges our ordinary perception of things with a novel way of presentation. Such images are artistically more inspiring and less restrained by rules of composition like the golden rule and the rule of thirds. Use a puddle, a car top or any reflective surface to accentuate your viewpoint on a particular theme in the image. You may even rotate a symmetrical reflection to create an illusion, depending on what and how you hope to express.

(Mirage: This image gives a striking new look at the dull, common city scene which is two passers-by chatting on a street. The legs are cut and placed upside down at the bottom of the photo while the bodies are at the right "orientation" on the upper third. I half squatted with my GX200 to wait for the right moment for this shot)

To me, these images combining truth and falsity in the composition are suited to express associative themes. My favourite one is the inspiration of an ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi from his dream in which he morphed into a butterfly. After he waked up, he wondered if he was actually a butterfly having a dream of himself turned into a human being or the other way round. One of his philosophical inspirations from the dream is that people cannot perceive truth and falsity if a delusion is real enough.

So, for the world is round and the gravity sticks everything to its place, I take a new look in this previously published photo at the pond with the fish swimming above the reflection:

And are we in fact walking head down and legs up with the reflection on top of us?