Unphotographable Objects and The Largest Glass Museum In the World

If you watch the show “Blown Away” on Netflix, you watch professional glassblowers compete for $10,000 plus a residency in Corning.

I had heard of Corning. I had spent time in upstate New York, and so it was a name I had heard of, like “Utica” or “Horseheads.”

I did not know that Corning had the largest glass museum in the world, and so I went to there.

What is interesting about intricate glass objects is that they become unphotographable. The light does not reflect properly at all. It goes in all directions, in interesting ways.

This is in contrast with the crispness and beauty of the show! Of course, a lot of glass is photographable, especially with the cameras that Netflix has. The show also captures pretty well the pacing that goes into making something if you were to for example take a class in Seattle (another mecca of glassblowing, like Corning) or Florida (which has everything). The space is cramped, you have a small amount of time to do anything, and the glass is really hot and I suppose the people who know they are clumsy do not get into it.

And so a lot about glassblowing did end up getting captured by the show. If you go to the Chihuly museum of glass in Seattle, and take photos and buy postcards, you will see that the beautiful colors do get captured very nicely, and sometimes are even more vibrant in good photos than with your eye. The contrast and accents get augmented somehow.

Given all this colorful splendor, for a while I forgot about this idea — that there should exist glass that is either impossible or very very had to photograph.

And so finding uphotographable objects yesterday felt special.

Behold, this furry cube.

Look at this adorable glass marshmallow! It is not that the image is blurry! It is that the cube is blurry! It is blurry because it is made of many small pieces of glass and each piece reflects light in a different direction. In real life, it just looks fluffy and soft and magical.

Another photo! You can see that now from this angle it looks very different. The first photo had more of the right “eye-ASMR-feel” of what it looked like even though it is blurry. You can’t really see how pretty the cube is here.

If I could buy this cube I would, but I am sure they would not sell me the cube.

Another favorite of mine from this museum was this. This glass fish tank of beautiful otherworldly alien hermit-crab trombone-faced lovers.

You sort of can see what it is about, with the depth perception. But again, it doesn’t really look like it looked like in real life. Given the state of James Cameron’s tech, there are almost certainly cameras that can do a good job of photographing this in a way such that you get what is most beautiful about it.

But it still is different — getting the photo that manages to “capture” what is best about it, rather than seeing it in real life and seeing how the light bounces around and changes as you move, and the light is also in the room with you.

I think we are used to the idea that in person there are other senses involved. You can hear things, smell things, touch things, feel the energy of different things. But then that there is still uncharted terrain in the area of what you “see” is also very nice to notice — to see glass arranged in such a way that the light bounces in such stellar ways.

I should post the names of these pieces, but I am sure they are on the website!