What if there were a simple technique that let you photograph what’s directly in front of you and what’s behind you at the same exact time, in the same exact frame? Stefan Falke found a way to capture everything that’s around him not in a distorted 360-degree image but a completely flat perspective.
It all started as a visual experiment. One day in 2023, Falke bought a handheld mirror from CVS for $10 with only a vague idea of what he wanted to do with it artistically. He wandered down to the Empire State Building and held the mirror up in front of the lens, directly in the middle of the frame. The squarish mirror captured the Hudson Yards in the reflection.
The Empire State Building and the Summit indoor observation deck at One Vanderbilt, New York.
The One Vanderbilt skyscraper and the Chrysler Building on 42nd street, New York.
Reflecting New York is a series of perfectly matched reflections, a pairing of both what’s directly in front of the artist and what’s behind him. Falke perfects the graphics of buildings, trees, and bridges with just a slight manual adjustment to what the mirror captures. “I realized soon that the mirror was an actor in the image, not just the reflection in it,” says Falke. “Then came my hand, which I tried to avoid showing at first, but it became an important part of the series. It became the story: A handheld mirror, my mirror, creates unusual visuals in familiar places.”
The “Jenga Building” and a steam tube on Church Street in Lower Manhattan, New York.
Falke loves to shoot midday in bright light, when most photographers hide. He calls it the “Kodak light.” He requires plenty of daylight because the f-stop is rather tight, controlling the amount of light that enters the lens in order to get sharpness throughout the mirrored picture and the background too. The shutter speed needs to be very fast, too, because the constantly moving mirror, wind factor, one-handed camera holding, and other factors make it difficult to freeze the reflected image. It is enormously difficult to hold the mirror with one hand and shoot with a fairly heavy Nikon D850 in the other and focus on two images at once, aligning everything perfectly.
Taxis at Madison Square Garden and Penn Station on 8th Avenue, New York.
The Oculus Transportation Hub at the World Trade Center in New York's financial district.
Falke never knows what he will shoot or in what direction he’ll wander when he ventures out; he doesn’t plan around the position of the sun, or plan at all really; everything is based on location, and every photograph in the series is found rather than scripted.
The Statue of Liberty and Manhattan's skyline, New York.
When I asked Falke what his favorite image from this series was, he claimed the photograph of Luna Park in Brooklyn's Coney Island with the Cyclone Roller Coaster in the mirror. “It has the perfect composition, color, elements, mood, and my hand and mirror have the right energy,” he says. “Love it.”
Luna Park and Deno's Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, New York.
English (US)