Light Box with Mirror 1939

This is Nathan Lerner's "Light Box with Mirror," a photograph, and I imagine it was made in a studio, somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. It's a black and white photo of a box that contains a bunch of spheres and cubes suspended by string. I'm thinking about Calder's mobiles, and how those shapes dance in space. But here, it's like the dance has been frozen, or captured. It makes me consider the relationship between photography and sculpture; the way they both deal with light and shadow, space and form. Look at the way the light catches on those shapes. It's so precise. What was Lerner thinking about when he arranged these forms? Was he trying to capture a fleeting moment, or create a new kind of space? Like all good art, this photograph is a kind of experiment, an inquiry into how we see and understand the world around us.