A little desert props itself up on a pair of carpet scraps in a beige driveway, reflecting a not-so-distant mystic universe. A perfect circle of cloudy blue sky lands in the midst of an ordinary green lawn. Ghostly figures appear out of nowhere. Lines bisect and extend into infinity. Flat panes of glass, nonchalantly inserted into the midst of otherwise banal scenes, subtly and mysteriously reconfigure the world.
The photographs of Mirrors (TBW Books), a new title based on the immensely popular Tumblr and Instagram archive of for-sale ads posted to Craiglist, innocently intrude into strangers’ bedrooms and trespass into their backyards. Unwittingly, the would-be sellers reveal themselves in bizarre and beautiful ways—a phantom hand, a pair of feet, a swath of wallpaper, a drawn curtain, a gaudy, overdressed living room, another one totally lacking in decoration or feeling. The sheer presence of the reflection interrupts reality, creating new graphic worlds, transforming even the plainest surface into an optical illusion. They invite a casual voyeurism; that lack of self-awareness is at the heart of their allure.“I’m not that interested in mirrors themselves,” says Eric Oglander, who has been obsessively collecting these images for some years now. “I’m interested in these photographs that people have accidentally captured.”
Oglander sculpts small-scale pieces and works on paper in his own practice and arrived at the mirrors by fluke, something he takes care to emphasize. “I didn’t have some ‘moment of brilliance,’ ” he says by phone from New York, where he now lives. What interests him in art is honesty. “I think you can look at a work of art and tell if it comes from a genuine place.” Oglander grew up outside Nashville, Tennessee, the son of a ceramicist and an abstract painter, but never went to art school himself, nor did he finish high school. For a while, he started buying and selling high-end bicycles, and spending inordinate amounts of time on Craigslist. There, amid the Missed Connections and passive-aggressive roommate ads and garage-sale listings, he first encountered weirdly pure, strangely appealing pictures. “I was really just attracted to the unintentional beauty,” he says. His initial discovery was a picture of a convex security mirror propped against a shed, in which two shadowy figures appeared—he worked a screen shot of it into a sculpture.
A classic Craigslist Mirror photograph is of a frameless square mirror in a drab gray background reflecting a brilliant green forest. Some of the mirrors mimic their surroundings like camouflage—Stephen Shore’s photograph U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, of a wordless highway billboard depicting a mountain scene, standing on the roadside within a similar scene, comes to mind.
“They run the gamut—some are really funny and I like them for that reason. Some are really compelling just for incredible objects being reflected inside someone’s home,” Oglander says. In the book, the images are stripped of their original captions, which Oglander says never addressed the weirdness of the pictures anyway. “I found one recently where a woman had thrown a white sheet over her body to photograph the mirror, and I was convinced I would read some mention in the item description of her acting like a ghost or making a joke, but I think she was actually just trying to hide herself. There was no, ‘Oh, and here’s my entire body, covered in a blanket, nothing strange to see here.’ I’m consistently surprised there’s no mention of the photos themselves being good or funny.”
He searches for them all over. Los Angeles, he says, tends to yield a lot of Craigslist Mirror images; Florida, too. “You can look in places with better weather and you’ll find more mirrors are taken outside to be photographed. And images of skies or the forest or what-have-you,” he says. “But I also love the interiors, the desolate middle-America shots. The homes are mind-blowing.” He is an equally avid accumulator of 3-D pieces—whale vertebrae, horse skulls, punching bags, and cameras are among the objects that fill the studio apartment he shares with his girlfriend and at least one storage space back in Tennessee. “I’m such a collector of culture and objects that I’m fascinated by looking at other people’s homes where it is just devoid of everything.” There is a distinct David Lynch quality in some of those curtain-drawn rooms, just as there is a yearning in the projected selves and driveway reflections of spectacular vistas that lurk around hidden corners or just across the road. The solitary mirror longs for its other self, for the sky and ocean captured in its gaze.
A vase of flowers regards its reflection; a computer screen stares down its echo; a dog pauses before a reverse of itself. In these images, the mirror becomes a character, too, a palpable observer in the room, quietly magnifying and distorting everything in sight. In a narcissistic, self-conscious era of deliberately produced and filtered and widely disseminated images, the photographs of Mirrors refreshingly, unabashedly offer a portrait of their makers’ truest selves: oddly striking and utterly lonesome, even in the presence of their own silent, infinite companion. “If within the four walls of a bedroom a mirror stares,” Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps the world’s most famous chronicler of the reflection, once wrote, “I am no longer alone.”
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