Excerpts from.. The Hamilton Spectator Burlington Wednesday, April 26, 2000 Photos serve as mirrors or windows Elaine Hujer Special To The Hamilton Spectator The Latow Photographers' Guild Juried Exhibition this year, now on view at the Burlington Art Centre, calls to mind a very famous book by critic and photographer John Szarkowksi. The book is called Mirrors and Windows and Szarkowski's thesis, much simplified, goes like this: Mirrors are photographs which are aligned with the romantic tradition, the view that the meanings of the world are dependent on our own personal subjective understandings. As Szarkowksi says, in images that are mirrors, "the field mouse, the skylark, the sky itself do not earn their meaning out of their own evolutionary history, but are meaningful in terms of the anthropocentric metaphors we assign to them." Windows, on the other hand, are photographs that describe the world independently of any human associations. A photographer creating windows believes that the world itself contains discoverable patterns of intrinsic meaning and that it is the role of the artist-photographer to discern these patterns and make them obvious to others through his art. Essentially, then, mirrors tell us more about the artist and windows, more about the world. The two photographs that received Honourable Mentions, seem to belong in the mirror category. Karen Schreiber's Flower Rainbow is a giclee print, a vivid chromatic fantasy that suggests a flower garden seen through a kaleidoscope. Schreiber says that she combined multiple exposures along with a new printing technology using watercolour ink jet spray to achieve the impressionistic results. The giclee, or ink jet spray, allowed her to blow up her photographic colour print into a much larger size than was possible with older technology. And by using photography, instead of painting for this image, Schreiber underlines that fact that photography is not just a medium of representation, but rather, like painting, a medium of the imagination.