Driving down the Delores Highway a while back, Paul (El Guapo) and I were headed for carnitas at Vicente's. Suddenly he slammed on the brakes, swerved into the oncoming lane, drove down the wrong side of the road for a couple of hundred yards bearing down on a terrified paisano in a battered pickup truck, and rolled at the last minute over the left shoulder into a parking lot.

This is known as a Mexican left turn.

I assumed it was the brightly colored glass balls that inspired the sudden detour.

I was wrong. It was the huge inflated bottle of Sol beer that drew Paul—unsurprising once you get to know him.

Photo: Paul Latoures

Something in the juxtaposition of a glass ball and the beer bottle inspired Paul. Much later while examining the image he shot, it realized that I had seen this composition before.

Yes, it's the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World's Fair. The fair was held a couple of years before I was born, but my father attended it. As an avid stamp collector when I was a boy, I was fascinated by the futuristic images of these buildings depicted on a postage stamp of that era. I still own that 3¢ stamp, pictured at the top of this post.

The glass balls—esferas del jardín—are decorator items introduced by famed architect Luis Barrigán sometime in the 1940s. He was said to have seen a few hanging in a pulqueria in Tonala, Jalisco. Barragán placed them in clusters on coffee tables. Today, they're ubiquitous and trite. There were five of them in my house when I bought it. I hid them away on a high shelf somewhere, out of sight.

Paul engaged the proprietor of the glass ball emporium cum beer bar in a protracted discussion about methods for drilling large holes in the balls—a project he later claimed had been on his mind for decades but which, I suspect, occurred to him just in that moment. Whatever the case, he and she found lots to talk about, and I found myself idly looking for ways to entertain myself beside the dusty highway.

I experimented with shooting the proprietor's reflection in a ball Paul was holding.

When shooting, I didn't notice that a fly was resting on the ball. (Apparently flies can be a hazard when photographing in Paul's vicinity.)

Next, I took a self-portrait. (See? No flies.)

Shooting into reflective spheres is like using a 180° lens. Forget framing. You get everything. The sky looks like another planet hanging there above me.

A sphere makes a cheap fisheye lens. The only problem is, you can't avoid getting an image of the photographer whenever you use it.