The Glass Between Us

We spend so much of our lives looking through things. We look through windows at the rain, through screens at the faces of people we have never touched, and through the memories we keep polished in our minds like smooth river stones. There is a strange, quiet distance in the act of observation. To watch is to be separate, a ghost in the room of someone else’s experience. We imagine that if we could just reach through the surface, we might finally understand the mystery of another person’s wonder. But perhaps the barrier is not a hindrance; perhaps it is the very thing that allows us to see clearly. Without the glass, without the space between the observer and the observed, would the moment be quite so fragile? We are all, in a sense, standing on the outside of our own lives, waiting for a reflection to tell us who we are. If you could step through the surface, would the world look the same, or would the light simply vanish?

Shirren Lim has captured this delicate boundary in her image titled Stuck in the Mirror. She invites us to consider the space between the spectator and the spectacle. Does the reflection tell us more than the face itself?