Accidental Nude Photos Reflected in Objects People Were Selling on Ebay

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Accidental Nude Photos Reflected in Objects People Were Selling on Ebay

Photographer Lotte Reimann uncovers a racy pocket of Ebay imagery in her new series.

This essay originally appeared in the Privacy & Perception Issue of Vice Magazine, created in collaboration with Broadly. You can read more stories from the issue here.

In 2012, Lotte Reimann learned about “reflectoporn,” an internet trend in which people strip, position shiny objects to reflect their naked bodies, and then take photos of them to post on websites like eBay. She wondered if this was a form of exhibitionism, or if it was more often accidental. Intrigued, she wanted to find someone purposefully posting these kinds of images, but after two months of searching, she came across lots of reflectoporn pictures, but not a single contact. She couldn’t find what she calls an “entrance into the world,” and began thinking that maybe it didn’t even really exist—that it was just a fetish listed on a Wikipedia entry, but with no active practitioners. She decided, then, to do it herself: She took some reflectoporn with her own objects, and posted them for sale on her eBay account, in the hopes of getting others posting reflectoporn to message her. Not long after, she was informed that her account had been suspended because her materials were, according to an email from eBay, “adult in nature.”

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The result of her experiment is a new project titled “Reflections—An Unfinished Collection,” a portion of which is featured here. The overall series is a mix of both her own images, and those she found online. There are nudes reflected onto scanners, cellphones, silver-colored bike helmets, and more. For now, she’s leaving “unfinished” in the title—as a reference to her failure in discovering more about this unique corner of the world wide web, and as a way to continue the series, should additional information come to light.