Las Meninas (2013)
32-page newsprint publication
Digital printing
Loose folio sheets
11.5 in. x 15 in.
Edition of 50
Las Meninas was a photo publication containing a series of 17 images that depict the photographer and/or camera’s reflection visible in mirror or glass. I extracted all of the images from Google Street View using the “interior view” function. The relationship between image-maker, viewer, frame, and apparatus is ambiguous, and plays out differently from scene to scene. The series suggests hidden (as well as revealed) connections to power both inside and outside the frame. In Las Meninas the re-framed mirror presents a utopian ideal (the perfect view(er) of commerce) as well as heterotopian uncanniness (the displaced, disembodied, powerless view(er)), recalling Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). A copy of Las Meninas is held at Museum of Modern Art Library (LPW S673 A12 m) as part of the Library of the Printed Web acquisition.
