Touching the Mirror
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- Touching the Mirror
- Doteky zrcadla
- 1973
- photographic documentation of an action, 10 vintage b&w prints
- 17 × 23,7 cm
A specific form of mirroring is apprehended by this series of ten photographs showing a hand in direct contact with a circular mirror. These photographs by Marie Kratochvílová, whose 1970s and 1980s work included documentation of Jiří Valoch’s and Dalibor Chatrný’s actions, show the hand touching the mirror first with its back and then with its closed palm, its closed fist, its thumb, all five fingers, and its open palm. Taken together, these pictures relativize the relationships not only between the body and its reflection but also between the reflection and the handprint, since the part of the mirror that is in immediate contact with the hand remains invisible and would reveal itself solely by way of the handprint left behind—as is then the case in Chatrný’s self-produced 1973 publication “Touching and Mirroring,” where these same photographs are accompanied by images of handprints in the positions in which the hands touched the mirror. K.C.