Mirrors in the City: Richard Estes and the Paris Street Scene

There’s something uncanny about walking down a city street and seeing yourself multiplied. Every shop window, every polished car hood, every angled pane of glass contains another version of you, slightly warped, refracted, or delayed. Cities are full of mirrors, but rarely do we pause to notice how much they shape our perception of space. Richard Estes did. And in Paris Street Scene, he froze that moment of double-seeing, the ordinary made unfamiliar, into a painting so meticulous it could be mistaken for a photograph until you realize a camera could never quite capture the silence it holds.

Estes is often called the father of photorealism, though the label both fits and undersells him. Yes, his canvases look like photographs, but his process was never simple duplication. He took multiple photographs, stitched their perspectives together, and then painted, not as a machine might record, but as an eye might linger. The Paris Street Scene depicts a typical Haussmannian block, featuring beige stone façades, wrought iron balconies, and a line of parked cars from another era. But at the right edge, the storefront glass fractures the view, offering a mirror image that stretches and doubles the street. It’s the same scene twice, yet not identical. Reflection isn’t replication, it’s translation.

When Estes painted this in the 1970s, Paris was still negotiating its own reflection. Postwar modernity was eroding the old city’s certainties; immigration, consumerism, and political unrest pressed against the ordered facades of Haussmann’s 19th-century rebuild. Just a few years earlier, in 1968, students and workers had flooded these same kinds of boulevards demanding revolution. Estes wasn’t making a direct political painting, but he was capturing the way cities hold contradictions in plain sight. The street looks empty, almost serene. But the reflection suggests a doubling of reality, a reminder that behind every façade is another perspective, another truth.

Compositionally, the painting is a masterclass in controlled disorientation. The sidewalk guides the eye forward, but the mirrored storefront diverts it sideways, into an uncanny echo. The muted palette, stone gray, beige, and the washed-out light of an overcast Paris afternoon, let the geometry dominate. Cars line up like soldiers; windows stack in perfect rhythm. And then the mirror interrupts, breaking the order without shattering it. It’s unsettling, but quietly so, a kind of visual vertigo.

Estes’ photorealism was controversial in its time. Critics dismissed it as sterile mimicry, the opposite of “true” artistic expression. But that misses the point. What Estes was doing was not mechanical reproduction but a meditation on looking itself. In an age when photography was threatening painting’s relevance, Estes demonstrated that paint could do what a lens could not: stop time, intensify it, and force us to confront the everyday as strange. The very sterility his critics complained about is the subject, the urban environment drained of people, vibrating instead with the ghostly presence of commerce, architecture, and reflection.

Today, in an era of smartphones and endless digital filters, Paris Street Scene reads differently. Its silence feels prophetic. The empty sidewalks echo with our own experience of pandemic streets. The reflection feels like a metaphor for life lived in screens, our days refracted through devices, our cities experienced as both real and mediated. Estes’ painting, in its meticulous stillness, anticipated how much of modern life would come to be lived in reflection rather than direct encounter.

What stays with me isn’t just the technical virtuosity, the way Estes makes glass more glasslike than glass, but the mood. It’s the strange emptiness, the absence of people in a space built for them. It asks us: what is a city without its citizens? What are we left with when the mirrors show the buildings but not the lives inside? It’s haunting, in a way. Not because it depicts decay, but because it shows continuity without presence.

I think about walking down streets like this myself and catching my own reflection, wondering which version is more real. Estes doesn’t answer the question, but he makes us look at it more closely. And that’s the point. In a world saturated with images, here is a painting that teaches us to see again.

The next time you pass a window on a quiet street, stop and take a look. Look at the reflection. Notice what it shows, and what it omits. In the glass, you might catch a glimpse not just of yourself, but of the city doubled, a reminder that even the most ordinary corner contains a secret. Estes knew this. His Paris Street Scene is proof.

Richard Estes, Paris Street Scene, oil on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Photo by Drew Jaehnig. Used under fair use for the purposes of commentary and criticism.

Richard Estes photographed by Jack Mitchell in 1971. Courtesy of Archive Photos/Getty Images. Used under fair use for commentary and criticism.