Standing Still in the Glass – A One Shot Story

Most of my photographs happen in reflections. Shop windows, puddles, a mirror left leaning in a doorway. I like that a reflection lets two places share one frame without any trickery. It’s just glass doing what glass does, and me deciding where to stand.

In September I spent five days in Prague with a Leica Q3. Under the arcade of the National Theatre the light drops sharply, and most people walk straight past the entrance. I stopped in front of it instead. The wooden doors each have glass set into the centre, and I think it’s double glazing, because every reflection came back twice, slightly out of register. Stone arches, the coffered vault overhead, the white façades across the street, all stacked on top of each other like a print pulled from too many plates.

I was focused on the glass, hunting for something in those layers, when a figure appeared in it. Not in front of me, but behind me. A young woman in black, in an outfit cut almost like a kimono, a red bow tied at her waist, small white charms hanging from her bag, her fringe over her eyes. Two older men were with her. In the glass, everything around her was doubled and drifting. She was the one clear, still shape in the middle.

I didn’t turn round. Turning would have broken it. I let the autofocus find her inside the reflection, at 28mm, wide open at f/1.7, 1/250s, ISO 4000 because the arcade swallows the light, and pressed the shutter twice.

By the second frame she had already turned, caught in profile as she began to move out of the glass. The first one is the photograph.

It can’t have been more than fifteen seconds. She walked quickly to another door and went in, the two men right behind her. I never saw her face directly, only her reflection. That’s the version I kept.

If you like this kind of layered city, I wrote more about the reflections I found in Prague, in glass and water, on my blog: Prague Reflections: Glass, Water and a Layered City.

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