The Medium is the Mirage, 2011–present


Marget Long explores the queer and trans poetics of mirages through a series of interconnected artworks: mirages as the subject of photographs (Inferior Mirages); mirages encountered “live” in the landscape (Mirage Viewing Station); mirages used as a ploy to fund a major Arctic expedition in 1913 (Crocker Land); and mirages as hallucinogenic landscapes depicted in films and popular cultural texts (You Were Drifting).


Map to Crocker Land. Crocker Land Expedition Papers, American Museum of Natural History, 1907.

Why mirages?

In its most common form, a mirage occurs when a steep thermal gradient bends light rays, causing an image from above to appear inverted below. While the image is real, perception bends as we try to make sense of what we see: the sky projected onto the ground appears as bluish water.

Mirages are supra-photographic. They are large-scale, open-air imaging events made without a camera or computer. The medium of the mirage is the earth, the air, and the sun: thermal layers of heated air bend light and duplicate, displace, or distort the “original” image. Mirages are trick light—nature’s special effects.

Mirages are deeply felt imaging events and analogues for the mixed sensory experience—both real and virtual at once—produced by the digital interfaces we inhabit. Consider the untouchable “content” on a touchscreen, or the strange nowhere/somewhere encountered while navigating in Google Earth, where the digital world and the physical world are enmeshed.

Mirages are figures of trans embodiment. A mirage is not a false image but a real optical event—light bending through layers of heated air—yet what we think we see is often wrong. The eye insists on familiar categories: water, shoreline, distant land. Meaning arrives before understanding catches up. In this way, the mirage echoes the visual politics of trans life, where bodies are continually interpreted through rigid cultural frameworks. Trans bodies are real; the assumptions attached to them are often not.

Mirages are culturally and historically linked with disorientation and lostness: watery visions on the desert horizon.

“Mirage, Sahara Desert.”
Optical Illusions. Franklin Watts, New York, 1987
Long’s interest in mirages was sparked by a single picture found in a book on optical effects. The blotchy nineteenth-century photograph of what appeared to be a shoreline did not attract attention until its caption was read: “Mirage, Sahara Desert.” A photograph of a mirage. How completely meta, as my students like to say. The image was a photograph about photography—the burning desire to fix something for the future—yet simultaneously a picture attesting to its own unstable relationship to index, documentation, and interpretation.

Mirage Space

The space and time of a mirage are completely different from those of an ordinary landscape. A mirage is never close; it is always receding, always somewhere in the distance. It defies normal laws of movement, perspective, and locatability: run toward a mirage at top speed, and you do not get any closer to it. Get too close, and it disappears.

A mirage also unfolds in a distinctly trans temporality. It is always ahead of you, always somewhere else, always arriving just beyond the horizon of where you stand. Move toward it and the image shifts, slides, or disappears entirely. The mirage refuses stable coordinates of distance, direction, and location. It is a landscape that is never quite where it appears to be. Like gender, the mirage reveals how vision reorganizes itself over time—how what once seemed impossible gradually comes into view.

Mirages are uniquely unmappable and unnavigable at a moment when geographic location systems such as Google Maps are held at a premium. Getting lost is no longer a profitable position in the post-internet economy. Location Services are ON.



El Mirage 6 Mi.” Marget Long, 2012

Finding Mirages

Where do you find a mirage, a “nowhere that is somewhere,” to use cartographer Alessandro Scafi’s phrase? In what kind of real, physical space can you reliably encounter an illusion?

Mirages are not (yet) visible on Google Earth, yet Google’s popular mapping interface is itself strangely mirage-like. Where exactly are you when you access a place through Google Street View? You are sitting at your desk—or standing on the street looking at your phone—but also simultaneously immersed in the place pictured on your screen.



El Mirage Lakebed. Google Earth, 2015
Long began searching for mirages using place names. Rancho Mirage, California sounded promising; El Mirage Dry Lakebed, even better.  They photographed at both sites in 2012. Later, during a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah, Long photographed mirages throughout the surrounding landscape.

A mirage does not show us something that isn’t there. It shows us how the world can change when perception bends.


PHOTOHOUSE37  
Commercial photography for non-profits. 



Copyright, Marget Long, All rights reserved, 2026