Audiovisual – Motion Graphics
Editorial
Photography
Windows of
Bolin Aiyue
A six-steps pattern
of observation, 2021
When confined at home for long periods of time as it happened during the Covid-19 crisis, windows become one’s only natural contact with the external world. They can be studied from different orientations, from inside and outside, and it is through a pattern of six steps that one may complete a cycle of observation.
The residence and the building
Consider a window. Is it simply a void traversed by a line of sight? No. In any case, the question would remain: what line of sight – and whose? The fact is that the window is a non-object which cannot fail to become an object. As a transitional object it has two senses, two orientations: from inside to outside, and from outside to inside. Each is marked in a specific way, and each bears the mark of the other. Thus windows are differently framed outside (for the outside) and inside (for the inside). Henri Lefebvre, The production of space, 1991, p.209
Who hasn’t been impressed by modern Chinese architecture upon arriving in Beijing, marked by its utilitarian, Lego block-style structures with massive forms and minimal decorative elements? Bolin Aiyue, also known as the Berlin Philharmonic, is one of these residences built in 2008 and situated in the eastern outskirts of Beijing, comprising thirty-eight buildings from six to twenty floors, with thousands of residents of diverse social classes. From October 2017 to June 2021, I lived on the fourteenth floor of one of these buildings, where its windows were at the core of this visual research project, as they connected the inside and the outside world in ways that I attempted to study.
Research question: How to study my own windows and those of my residence from different inside-outside orientations?
First and last photograph of the view from my northern windows: October 2nd, 2017, and June 22nd, 2021
Following Lefevre’s analysis of the window, my proposal entailed to explore and classify these orientations across six chapters, where the relation between observer and observed—be it the windows themselves or what is seen from them—is the constant that gave a common thread to the project’s reflection and experimentation stages. In these six chapters, artist’s references were commented and visual experiments were conducted, starting with the most mobile and common of observations, when walking within the residence looking at others’ windows from the outside. Subsequent chapters were rather settled in one space, my own apartment and its surroundings, which reduced the range of the study, unless one considers the distant view from my windows. Finally, the last chapter was the most complex as it involved four of my neighbours and their respective windows. What initially started as a project alone, within my apartment, expanded by being shared with others.
From outside
to other windows
Windows: Part 1
There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe. You think?
In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter, Tomas Leach, 2013, min.45–46.
When André Vicente Gonçalves undertook his photographic project ‘Windows of the world’ in 2009, he examined not only the shapes of windows but also everything surrounding them—materials, colours, balconies, architectural details, planters, curtains, objects—demonstrating that windows within the same city share many similar elements. What the artist and the viewer do not know, for obvious reasons, is what occurs within those spaces. Even after living in a building for years, one becomes acquainted with neighbours, but may have never entered their home, wondering who they really are and making suppositions about how they live. In a sense, Adas Vasiliauskas' quarantine portraits (2020), have attempted to provide us with a glimpse of families at their windows by using his drone; however, these were staged scenes rather than authentic moments of indoors life that could tell us more about society.
During the initial months of the Covid-19 crisis, while strolling through the alleys of the residence, I took numerous photographs of buildings’ windows, paying closer attention to the architecture during daylight and to social life at night. However, since most windows lacked curtains, ethical concerns arose if I was invading people's privacy by photographing their windows intrusively without their consent. For the sake of the project, I focused my attention on lights and the few objects placed near the windows, mainly hanging clothes, rather than on individuals in compromising situations. I frequently noticed that amidst the multitude of windows, the contrast between cool and warm lights mingling with the darkness of the night not only evoked a sense of magic, but also smallness in facing such dazzling presence of life. I would contemplate these lights as artistic compositions that triggered my imagination, as behind them could be a family sharing dinner, a father telling a story to his daughter, people doing sport, a couple watching TV or making love. A lightened room hides infinite possibilities that do not necessarily need to be seen but rather imagined. It is this reverie without malice that could almost free us from temporality, awakening an echo that is hopeful towards life in its various forms.
From outside
to my windows
Windows: Part 2
What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke, like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, the earliest picture can never be restored. Walter Benjamin, One-way Street, 2016, p.63
After looking at other people’s windows, a rather amusing experiment was to observe my own windows from the outside, narrowing the surveyance to a single, specific area. Situated on the fourteenth floor of a high building near Chaoyang North Road, my windows faced west and north, most of them measuring 1.35 meters in height, except for those on the bedroom’s closed balcony, which were bay windows replacing the wall. From outside, these ones stood out with their white frames and their broken wooden bars on the left; the bathroom window also differed from others with its mosquito net pulled up; while my northern windows had Christmas stickers, facilitating their identification from across the street. It was then, seeing them changed, that I realised how I would never again feel that first irrecoverable impression of my building—that day of October 2017 I knew this was the place where I was going to live.
Alper Yesiltas' window project.
Series of photos capturing my own windows from different points of view.
While researching, I recalled that the photographer Alper Yesiltas (2017) used to capture a window that faced his room over twelve years (2017), and even if it wasn’t his own; one suddenly perceives it as a living entity. We can see its white lace curtain, its wall changing colours from snowy to sunny days, and how the passage of time gradually transforms the window until it is eventually dismantled, disappearing much like life itself when one passes away. This active contemplation of the same window over time shows a rare perseverance in representing the same element until it becomes an obsession. In my photographs, I opted to examine my windows from varying distances and angles, rather than relying on a single frame of reference, and I even asked two neighbours to take them in picture from outside, after giving instructions on how to recognise them. Sharing my exact location with others momentarily diminished my sense of privacy, yet I began to imagine myself as a stranger looking at these same windows years or even decades later—the only remaining entrance to that previous life I once had.
From my windows
to outside
Windows: Part 3
He who walks down the street, over there, is immersed in the multiplicity of noises, murmurs, rhythms […] By contrast, from the window, the noises distinguish themselves, the flow separate out, rhythms respond to one another. Towards the right, below, a traffic light. On red, cars at a standstill, the pedestrians cross, feeble murmurings, footsteps, confused voices. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 2013, p.38.
There comes a moment when orientations shift, as it is not from outside that observation happens anymore, but from inside, from the immovable window. When researching paintings such as ‘Goethe at the Window’ (1787) by Johann Heinrich Tischbein, ‘Woman at a Window’ (1822) by Caspar David Friedrich, or ‘Early Morning’ (1858) by Moritz von Schwind, subjects are seen from behind, gazing out of an open window while details of trees, mountains or buildings are barely visible through them, as the painters were more concerned with the interiors. We begin to see details of Parisian streets from Gustave Caillebotte’s impressionist balconies, yet the entire spectacle seen by the subjects was still not shown to us.
More recently, in the last decade, Canadian painter Shaun Downey depicted lonely, contemplative women in their apartments, some looking through windows in serene and elegant compositions either focused on specific elements happening outside, sometimes even using binoculars, or simply allowing their mind to wander freely, probably consumed by their own thoughts in this lonesome activity of introspective nature. Before Downey, American painter Edward Hopper captured memorable urban scenes that convey this loneliness, and it is during the Covid-19 crisis, that his painting ‘Cape Cod Morning’ (1950) was widely shared on social media, portraying a tense woman looking out a bay window, inciting the viewer to contemplate the uncertainties that might come in such isolated place—the fear of an unknown virus. When only half of a story is shown to us, suppositions grow stronger in the imaginative mind.
Beyond the subjects, their interiors and their internal experiences, we definitely want to know what people actually see from their windows, and it is with the advent of photography that the spectacle of the city was further unveiled.With a view on Washington Square Park from his 12th floor, photographer André Kertész captured fragments of city life from 1952 until his death in 1985, while from 1958 to 1985, photographer Ruth Orkin embarked on a comparable project from her 15th-floor apartment at 65 Central Park West in New York. They were both far enough from the ground to broaden their scope yet close enough to enter in people’s intimacy, capturing the parks and their near-by urban life. Similarly, in his documentary Hush (2003), Victor Kossakovski turned out his eyes towards his street in Saint Petersburg, not only documenting the Nietzschean sense of eternal return in the repeated repairs and cleaning of a concrete road over a year, but also the fragments that make the street captivating and uninteresting at the same time.
The unique vantage point offered by a window invites us to contemplate and engage with the view in a more attentive way, even more when this interaction happens every single day. By carrying this logic far beyond, one could capture mundanity with its cycles by choosing a static constant that would always be present, as Ukrainian photographer Yevgeniy Kotenko did by photographing a local park bench for a decade, from 2007 to 2017. The bench was visible from the kitchen window of his parent’s fourth floor apartment in Kiev, allowing him to document its encounters with people. Aside from capturing urban life, one must not overlook the window itself as a physical element with its own shape and materiality, which stands between the viewer and the outside world, as photographer Josef Sudek, for example, developed in a series of photographs taken of his studio window in Prague, from 1940 to 1954. The book titled ‘The window of my studio’ not only documents what happens through the window but also presents the changes in its appearance over time, from clear glass to frosted or water-dappled, depending on the days.
From all these references, I explored a series of observations from my windows, compiled into a fifteen-minute video. If I had to describe what I used to see from my north-facing windows, there was Chaoyang North Road, along with an ancient mosque behind, followed by a school and numerous buildings in all directions, with distant mountains visible only on clear days. From my west-facing windows, the residential buildings were on the left and front, then an animated resting area just below and the road on the right. For months, I have photographed the same drying racks of this communal space, capturing the subtle variations in colour as different people brought their bed sheets to dry. Then, on May 22nd, I recorded the sights and sounds from that same window at three-hour intervals over twenty-four hours, capturing these visual and sensory fragments before seven o'clock for seven consecutive days.
Exploring the area’s rhythms in such way allowed me to witness the movement of the sun and to hear different sounds appearing besides the cars. If I was asked about the moments that I enjoyed the most from my windows, it was between six and eight in the morning, when I could hear birds chirping, people exercising and the megaphone of a man repairing electronic devices. Why that sound? It was somewhat reassuring to know that life was carrying on as usual. I felt the same in summer evenings, between seven and eight, as I used to enjoy the sound of children playing and women dancing, especially when it was Wang Qi’s song Standing and Waiting For You For Three Thousand Years (站着等你三千年) around a quarter past eight.
Drying racks, benches and a playground area seen from my bathroom window
View from my living room window.
Video making from my bathroom window.
While I appreciated the sounds from the western windows, I admired the views from the northern ones. From my hidden perspective, I have filmed the mountains, observed the end of the fasting month of Ramadan at the mosque as well as witnessed people walking and working on the street. If we were more individuals acting that way, we would become the street watchers defended by urban writer Jane Jacobs as the ‘eyes upon the street’ that may bring more safety to a city in being ‘the natural proprietors of the street’ (1961, p.35). As attentive citizens, we would provide a valuable understanding of a street or residence, yet we would need to debate on how these eyes are present and respond to what is observed.
If you are in China, you may have to activate your VPN to watch this video.
Lastly, inspired by the paintings described earlier, I photographed myself as the subject inside his room looking out through his four windows. These self-portraits constituted a sub-category, highlighting how my body posture and interaction varied with each window, as I was typically seated at my desk when outlooking from the living room window, whereas I would stand when observing through the other windows of my apartment. While this chapter focused more on what was seen outside, it did not omit the observer and the window from which such observation happened. Having said that, this exploration of the window in its physicality and impact on indoor surroundings was taken a step further in the next chapter.
From my windows
to inside
Windows: Part 4
This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s way, p.114.
Vermeer’s mastery lies in his ability to represent the light coming into his studio from a left-side window, but it is again Edward Hopper that mesmerizes me. ‘Sun in an Empty Room’ (1963) probably stands as a pinnacle of his exploration of sunlight on the floor and walls of an empty apartment, creating rectangular bright and dark shapes that vary with the orientation and shape of the window. The intensity of light and the surfaces it illuminates also affect colour shades, as the effects of light on a green concrete wall will not be the same as on a parquet floor. Following these findings, I sought to photograph these effects in my four rooms to reveal such shades. Metaphorically, from my windows to ‘inside’ did not only mean that the ‘outside’ went into a room but also into myself, my wife, and the way light—or its absence—shaped our mood, our awakening, and our sense of what the day might hold for us.
Beyond providing light and views, windows serve various practical functions in daily life, here as everywhere else. After a shower, we used to open the bathroom window to let the floor dry, and after cooking, both the kitchen and bathroom window were opened to dissipate odours. In winter, the afternoon sun on the closed balcony warmed up the bedroom while in summer, we opened them up to ventilate the apartment and avoid air conditioning—actions that would seem familiar to any reader. To prevent the door from slamming shut when the windows were open, I used a shoelace to tie the door handle to a metal towel holder, and we would put the mosquito net to keep insects outside, which paradoxically obstructed our view. The same happened when we opened the window for fresh air as we got in turn more dust inside, as if it was inevitable for a window to have this dual role. While windows are mainly a functional element, some may completely lack of practical utility, while others are adorned with decorations, like the large illustrations and Christmas stars we added, leaving us with a rather strange fairy touch inside the apartment.
Light effects coming from my windows.
Other functions than light.
From my windows
to other windows
Windows: Part 5
That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public. Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, min.75.
In Edward Hopper’s 'Night Windows' (1928), we see the half-figure of an anonymous woman depicted near the illuminated windows of her apartment at night, unaware that she is being seen by voyeuristic viewers, whether the artist or the spectators of the artwork. Although the viewer could be on the street watching this mysterious and erotic display, the point of view is higher and may suppose it is observed from the window of another building. The painting looks like a frame of Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘Rear Window’ (1954), where the woman could be a neighbour of the photographer L.B. Jeffries, played by James Stewart. As he spies on his neighbours and gives them nicknames, he discovers a murder by getting his voyeuristic practice beyond ethics, crossing the line between private and public space. Driven by curiosity, incessant watching can lead one to get entangled in people’s life, sometimes with unimaginable consequences.
In the short film ‘The Neighbors' Window’ (2019), a couple spies another couple’s window and is surprised to discover, in the end, that they were being watched by that same couple all this time. Some people may act driven by impulse rather than common sense, stealing what should not be stolen, our privacy, freedom, and vulnerability. Works by photographers like Merry Alpern (1995), Gail Albert Halaban (2009), Fosi Vegue (2014) or Yasmine Chatila (2016), reveal how controversial it may be accessing anonymous apartments under the cover of the night, unveiling ordinary scenes or, in some cases, sexual activities. The totalitarian society of surveillance is criticised by all of us as free citizens, but when individuals seek to keep an eye on their neighbours with their camera, they are called artists.
What is even more paradoxical is that those who photograph people would certainly not accept being photographed themselves. Drawing the curtain and turning off the light is a plea for privacy, to avoid being seen by others at night, as ‘we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves […] Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world’ (Berger, 1972, p.9). In this given context, Duchamp’s ‘Fresh Widow’ (1920) with the panes of glass covered in black leather could shield us from the outside world but could also confine us in our solitude, much like a window facing a wall. While I may have watched my neighbours at times, as the deranged artists described earlier, I have avoided them in most of my photographs, capturing only their silhouettes and focusing on interiors as if their windows were the frame of an artwork, a metaphor borrowed from René Magritte’s ‘The Human condition’ (1933) and his series of broken windows.
Windows: Part 6