What the camera sees (through glass)

A painting in the window of a gallery on Old Brompton Road cried out for taking home and looking at for a long time. The best I could do was to find out the artist's name - Helen Booth - and to try to capture the memory.

The camera, though, needed to include the reflection of the other side of the street - and a ghost of the photographer. Behind these layers of the contingent present is the painting, with its own layers of past and present -I'm interested in that overlay, but juxtaposed reflections of buildings and street life surely doesn't fit in with the artist's intention! On her website are her Threads drawings - traces not imprints, a chronology rather than a cross-section -
Some work by John Cage comes to mind. As well as photograph-as-time machine, I seem to be looking for art-as-trace, a sense of the ephemeral ... and am trying to formulate this quest more exactly. The words taken out while writing this post are as informative as the ones left in. The glass that catches reflections is also a filter.