The other day, as I was casually killing a few minutes browsing about the internet, I happened across this website that reminded me of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Photographer Tom Hussey was hired by the pharmaceutical company Novartis to create a series of advertisements for a drug that helps patients maintain long term memory during Alzheimer's.
Included in this post are a few samples of Hussey's work for the campaign, but to see more click here.
This reminded me of Alice's adventure immediately due to the power of the looking glass. In Alice's story, she is transported to another crazy world, while in Hussey's art the mirror provides a transport back to a time that was. I thoroughly enjoy this, because a mirror is thought of as just reflecting the present, but both Carroll and Hussey see it as a means for taking what is, and bending it to an alternate reality. In these cases, the looking glass serves as a reminder or what was or what could be, and yet still maintains a bent version of reality. For example, Alice believes her kitten was the queen - a connection between the mirror world and her life - and the man in the first picture sees his coffee cup as a flask - a connection between his current life and his life in the past as a scientist.
I know this subject matter jumps a bit back to Alice and Through the Looking Glass in our first few weeks of class, but when I saw these images I could not resist posting about them. Hopefully they can serve as a reminder to us of the beauty and fantasy of looking past the current and obvious.
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