Reflection in Old Glass, Resembling a Painting

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Aug 11th, 2003, by Alex Zorach

I took this photograph of an unusually distorted reflection in the glass of a very old window, in a house in Maine. Only later did I realize, when looking at the picture, that it looked almost as if I had taken a photograph of an oil painting.

Glass, although it functions for most practical purposes as a solid, on long time-scales functions like a very slow-flowing liquid. The panes of glass on very old windows thus become slowly distorted in fluid-like patterns. In Maine, my grandparents' house, and many of the other similarly-aged houses and buildings in the area, mostly have old windows like these.