Selfless Selfies 2

Old Town Lyon Store Window

Selfies are the photographic genre of our time. So superficially revealing, so deeply unrevealing. This set of images shares those contradictions but inversely.

While walking the streets of Lyon’s old town, I came upon a store window displaying a racing bicycle of 1960s vintage. I immediately thought of my dad, who had a longstanding passion for bicycling and bicycles, dating from the early 1960s. (He was a man ahead of his time in this and several other respects.) The bike in the window seemed to predate, but not by much, my first “10-speed”, A Schwinn Varsity, which was a gift from my dad.

I didn’t bother with my DSLR camera; this was an image meant for an iPhone. But I found composing the photo frustrating, because glass both reflects and transmits light. Among the reflections was me. Not interested in taking a selfie in that context, I maneuvered every which way to get an angle of light that didn’t include me—or any other background for that matter—as a subject. I eventually gave up on that, and in reviewing each photo, I became increasingly interested in the serendipitous visual effects when playing with the light transmission/reflection dynamic that glass produces. I played with those effects through at least 20 photos. And I didn’t finish playing with them until after I had thoroughly processed this photo in Lightroom and Photoshop, months later. The final product, which I had printed, seemed to bewilder my dad. But I was pleased.

What most captured me esthetically was the collage-like effects of the reflections superimposed on what was on the other side of the window. Among the reflections were the buildings across the narrow street and passersby. And the back of my iPhone—which was in particularly striking protective case—my fingers on top.

Below is a photo of another bicycle taken not far north of Lyon in the Beaujolais region, a village called Oingt. If you are an English speaker don’t bother trying to pronounce that. Even the proper French pronunciation sounds to me like a noise a frog would make. The bicycle is cleverly integrated into a garden landscape, which I found visually compelling. I used my DSLR for this one.