REFLECTING
In the series Reflecting, the mirror becomes a medium of transformation — an instrument that renegotiates the relationship between human and world. People hold geometric mirrors — circles, triangles, planes — in front of their faces, or the mirrors lie autonomously within the landscape: by the sea, in the mountains, in open terrain.
They reflect sky, rock, and light, while withdrawing the face — the subject — from direct visibility.
What emerges is not a traditional portrait, but a shift in the act of seeing itself. The mirrors open an in-between space in which the self is no longer the center of perception but part of a larger exchange: the interplay between body, space, and reflection. In this dissolution of boundaries between subject and environment, figure and background, photography becomes a question about seeing — and about what disappears within perception.
The geometric forms — circle, triangle, plane — function as signs of a universal language. They point to order, to structure, to the idea that behind all visible things lies a principle. Yet Schmid employs this clarity not to define, but to open. The clean shape becomes a site of transition: light, landscape, and body mirror one another until it is no longer clear who or what is reflected in whom.
These photographic spaces are at once precise and dislocated. The mirrors fracture perspective, create doubled horizons, and displace the logic of representation. In them, the world meets itself — not as an image, but as a question: Who is looking at whom? Is it the human who sees the sky, or the sky that sees the human?
Here, reduction does not signify absence but expansion. The absence of the face generates a new kind of presence. The mirrors act as bodies without identity, as membranes between inside and outside. They make visible that every act of seeing is already a mutual act of being seen: everything we observe also observes us.
Thus, Reflecting becomes both a meditative and an analytical exploration of the relationship between image, body, and world. The series operates at the threshold where perception turns into awareness and the visible becomes meaning. Its poetry lies in precision, its depth in the silence between gaze and mirror.
Reflecting reminds us that the image is not a window, but a mirror — and that in every reflection lies a gesture of return: to the earth, to breath, to light, and to the knowing that everything we see is also seeing us.
Text by Anita Schmid
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Den 20. ging Lenz durch‘s Gebirg. Die Gipfel und hohen Bergflächen im Schnee, die Täler hinunter graues Gestein, grüne Flächen, Felsen und Tannen. Es war naßkalt, das Wasser rieselte die Felsen hinunter und sprang über den Weg. Die Äste der Tannen hingen schwer herab in die feuchte Luft.Am Himmel zogen graue Wolken, aber Alles so dicht, und dann dampfte der Nebel herauf und strich schwer und feucht durch das Gesträuch, so träg, so plump. Er ging gleichgültig weiter, es lag ihm nicht‘s am Weg, bald auf- bald abwärts. Müdigkeit spürte er keine, nur war es ihm manchmal unangenehm, daß er nicht auf dem Kopf gehn konnte.
— Lenz von Georg Büchner —
