Looking up from the living room chair, the framed picture by chance reflected the reading light’s bright lampshade and nearby reference globe. Since lens, wall art, and the room lamp formed a perfect alignment, the effect is to put the lamp and globe into the golden picture frame. A different relationship of the three parts would give different results. The ghostly image might be out of the frame in part or altogether. So this happy coincidence of composition leads to the observation that borrowed frames, reflected subjects not actually located in front of the lens, and carefully juxtaposed compositions can produce a kind of serendipity; lending a feeling of amplified significance and turning an ordinary view into something more than that, possibly looking extraordinary for a moment.
By analogy to the experience of thinking and seeing the world or solving problems that come to one’s notice, perhaps there is a similar process of amplifying ordinary situations into something out of the ordinary. It could be one or more of these same properties – planned or serendipitous: fortunate alignment of elements to suggest a meaningful relationship (e.g. ‘halo effect‘ when juxtaposing A with B), or the increased attention that comes from a frame placed around the subject to detach it from the surrounding context, or it could be the effect of reflecting the matter from the nominal subject being discussed or wrestled with. In each case, alone or in combination, as in the illustration above, the result can be unexpectedly pleasing.
see2think 