Whenever you look at something in the mirror, you experience a phenomenon called lateral inversion: the apparent reversal of the mirror image's left and right when compared with the object itself.
I’m not going to go into details of the physics behind it, as this is a concept we’re familiar enough with to take for granted and process subconsciously. We manage to use mirrors every day without experiencing too much cognitive dissonance.
But what does this have to do with photography?
Look at the following two versions of the same photo of my friend Axe. Which of them is laterally inverted?
Hint: Axe's husband's and daughter’s names are Raghu and Kimaya respectively. I thought her tattoos might make this too easy, so I laterally inverted my logo to try and confuse you.
Most of us have a mental image of our own appearance, largely influenced by what we see in the mirror every day: a laterally inverted likeness. Unless you’re accustomed to looking at dozens of photographs of yourself on a daily basis, your mental image of yourself is most likely determined by your mirror image.
This would be fine if we were all perfectly symmetrical in appearance. As many photographers - including Alex John Beck with his Both Sides Of project - have demonstrated, this is seldom the case.
One’s expectations regarding own likeness are of course deeply personal, but I’ve come to think that physics has something to do with this.
Something tells me that lateral inversion is at least part of the reason that so many of us think we look different in our photographs. The images produced by cameras are not laterally inverted, unlike our reflections in the mirror, and appear somewhat different from what we might expect.
During a portrait session I tend to show my subject the (unedited) results as we go along, just so we’re both comfortable with how the shoot is progressing. Some subjects tell me that even though they really like the photographs, they feel they look like a little different in their photographs compared to what they they think they look like.
The good news is that other people looking at us are not accustomed to looking at laterally inverted images of our faces and bodies, and don’t expect photographs of us to comply with our reflections in the mirror.
Let’s take a look at another portrait:
Which of these is laterally inverted? Is it the one with the inverted logo? Do I tend to light most portraits from one side? Does all this even matter?
Sometimes I wonder if I should be laterally inverting all portraits I make, so that they might seem more familiar to the subjects.
Things, I suspect, might be a bit more complex than that.
Still, I find lateral inversion to be a useful concept to be aware of: one that I’ve started to discuss with my portrait subjects while photographing them, to try and bridge the perceptual gap between what the mirror shows and what the camera sees.
