I · 1Windows2021–22

A window is built to be looked through. Here it is only looked at.

A building is a wall with holes in it, made for looking out. From the street, attention goes to the architecture as a whole (height, style, address), and the windows disappear into it. That oversight made them a good subject for an absurd exercise.

Photographed across New York between 2021 and 2022, each window is framed straight on with its stretch of facade around it, then flattened. Lined up, the variations come forward: paint, brick, the shape of an arch, the depth of a sill, grandeur in one and plainness in the next. Repetition is the method. The more windows there are, the less any one of them explains, and the more the set reads as a portrait of the city.

The effort has an absurdity the work makes no attempt to hide: walking a city to photograph its windows, then filing them into a collection that can never be complete. A catalogue with no end. The absurdity is the point. So much attention, spent on the part of a building nobody looks at.

A book, Frame of Sight, was mocked up from the series; its spreads appear here alongside the photographs.

Windows was the gateway. F_RM and Blocks followed directly, and Extractions picked up the flattening some time later, turning from the facade to the object.