We humans are social creatures. Without others to reflect our behavior back to us we lose what
defines us-language culture the capacity for creative expression. That is why the
photographer Merrick d'Arcy-Irvine and the fashion designer Julia Bajanova are invested in
intense encounters: with the people who appear in their pictures but also with each other as
artists and as humans and between their media and the materials out of which they are made.
The materiality and sensual experience of those media in the physical world are the focus of
the pictures gathered in this volume which is why d'Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova eschewed all
digital technologies. Sensuality forges an emotional bond between their creative universes
whose boundaries become permeable as do the dividing lines between genres. Colors and forms
are fused in a shared language of visual art and fashion in which d'Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova
write their messages in light on the photographic paper. They speak to what makes us human:
creative energies untrammeled by the necessities of everyday life. The pictures in Mirror then
are reflections of our existence and portals of self-knowledge.
