Audiovisual – Motion Graphics
Editorial
Photography
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.