THE WINDOW 2

PAGE 1 (w/essay), PAGE 2 (w/essay), PAGE 3 (sequences), PAGE 4 (no words), PAGE 5 (no words) PAGE 6 (themed example) , PAGE 7 (themed compilations), PAGE 8 (a man in parts), PAGE 9 (black & whites) PAGE 10 (Vignettes)

See connections & themes in sets across the photos HERE. Use the Search bar below to find specific themes, subjects, or images or prints by a one-word tag (i.e. “man”; “dance”; “silhouette”; “crosswalk”; “protest”; “dogs”, “W-1607”… ):

Another noticeable pattern in the series is the Groundhog Day phenomena, where we see in multiple images the same person in the same location, except that the fine details slighlty vary. These iterative photos are like alternate takes in an infinite film, the actor or director varying the scene just a bit each time. The bearded man on the crosswalk in the same spot and same clothes, but carrying a different bag. The sanitation truck in the same location, but with a different driver. The scooter guy on the same sidewalk, but dodging different pedestrians. These shots, though very similar, have been taken days or even months apart, and so have the effect of collapsing time, and illustrating that, even at a small scale, history rhymes. (The iterations also gamify the work, encouraging the viewer to “spot the differences” or “guess the interlude”).

A volume of content increases our chances of seeing something we can directly relate to… an emotion we have experienced, a suitation we’ve lived through, a character we know really well. The Window functions something like On Kawara’s paintings of calendar dates; because of the sheer number of individual works in that series we eventually see things that personally connect to our own life (“There’s my mom’s birthday”, “I was in New York Sept. 11”), but in the photo series it’s more like “I’ve done that” or “I’ve felt that”, or “Mmm-hmm” or “Ouch”. We will, of course, due to the number of works in The Window, also witness lifestyles, cultures, events or circumstances foreign to our own, but because they are in the continuum of the series, in context with more familiar situations, we can more easily connect to the people in those other photos as well.

Some photos have obvious dramatic content — a man unconscious on the ground, or tornado clouds looming — while some are simply the beautiful everyday (a man waking with a saw, someone sitting with an outstretched leg, a mop propped on the windowsill). For some photos you have to study the image to spot the story, the moment or narrative unlocked when you notice the fighter jet tiny in the sky, the squatting dog on the side refusing to walk, or the woman’s legs covered entirely in tattoos.

The pandemic passes (and returns and returns) as evidenced by masks and crowds or lack thereof. Extraordinary and ordinary people (many are both, many are neither) move across the tiny concrete stage below the Window. “And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances” as Shakespeare wrote. We see across the photos repeating characters, who are sometimes the lead, sometimes a bit player — for example the smokers repeatedly on break are both Shakespeare’s and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. More than a few of the players show up in others’ stories, their independent narratives overlapping over time, thematic connections interweaving like in a Robert Altman film.

When The Window is viewed as an anthology film, incremental changes seen in the repeating backgrounds and at the edges of the photos reveal subthemes of ephemerality and ambiguity (and how both have simultaneously beautiful and ugly sides). There are shifts in the ambient lighting across the days and seasons, soft to harsh, and light reflections from various buildings that briefly materialize, morph, and traverse the sidewalk like geometric will-o’-the-wisps as the sun’s arc alters in the sky. Shadows lengthen and the angle marks the hour, month, millennium. People become living sundials. More peripheral details: to the left, junk accumulates and disappears as condo residents move in and out; at the center, dark pavement patches appear on the road, mending cracks; gray gum spots accrete in constellations on the sidewalk; cushions blown off a balcony by a windstorm wait days for pickup after careful placement on the tree planter’s ledge. And: a bike rack, bent to sculptural abstraction by vandals, is eventually removed; a tree gradually loses its autumnal leaves, revealing a plastic bag caught in the branches. At the right edges of the photos an entire city block of homes and businesses is razed and towering digging machines erected for new construction. High above that, jets suddenly draft lines in the sky as international air travel becomes possible again. Still further up in the background, top right corner, the moon waxes and wanes, and the bright dots of Saturn and Venus and Jupiter advance, undramatically, inexorably, in tiny degrees across the vast heavens.

None of the photos are staged. No mise-en-scène. No matter how tempting it would be to hire a marching band to walk by nude, or stick sparklers in the tree planter at night, or by physical effort or Photoshop remove a piece of trash, or shout down to have an interesting character, whose photo was missed, pass by again, the artist resisted. These are not works made with set designers, teams of assistants, tons of equipment, helicopters, or composited from mulitple takes a la Jeff Walls. No crane shots, no drone, just an iphone. Over a sustained length of time the artist ceded control to weather, unpredictable people, imperfect lighting, luck, and random events. And working with the reality of the setting — obscuring electrical wires, ugly garbage drifts, a car ruining the composition — all were kept in as part of the process.

Many photos are highly cinematic though in their lighting, the subjects, by happenstance, dramatically lit by the reds and blues of ambulance or firetruck beacons, the oranges of breaklights, ambers of hotel lighting, the neon hues from LED modified cars, or spotlit into chiaroscuro by automobile headlights or police flashlights. There is the atmospheric glow of an evening sun shower, there are sharp-edged light reflections from condo glazing that track across the frame like in a Bladerunner movie. There are oblique shadows cast during the golden hour, diffuse purple hues at sunset, and desaturated light during snowstorms.

For hundreds of years painting has been thought of as an “open window” through which one sees the world, or a world, an illusion of reality in the frame. The Window project literally looks through a window to show reality, but many of photos in the series feel like paintings: the friends clustered around their injured friend echo the composition of The Depostion of Christ by Raphael; the busy fight-scene crowd reminds of the famous detailed paintings of the Battle of Waterloo; the girl holding her friend in her arms resonates with Michelangelo’s Pieta. The woman changing in the window is Degas’ Woman After a Bath (or perhaps the movie poster for Rear Window). The smoking bouncers are reminsicent of the urban night vignettes in paintings by Edward Hopper. The garbage truck, lit up in red, becomes as majestic and monolithic as the ocean liners found in modernist paintings…

All the photos had to be taken within a narrow window of time. Many photos had to be shot in one or two seconds, before the people passed out of the framing of the trees or crosswalk. If something caught the attention of the artist (an incident heard or observed outside), the window had to be unlocked and opened, the camera grabbed, focused, centered and shot all before the subject left the little sliver of the available view. (Ansel Adams poised before the same mountain for hours this is not). When it happened it became an exercise of Now, of needing to be exactly in the moment. As a result, occassional imperfections occured — a finger in the frame, a strange angle, blurring — but these have been kept in precisely because they reveal this dynamic process. (And: our Instagram eyes are accustomed to, and even expect, the seductively undaunting aesthetic charm of the causal social media photo — even if professionally faux-naive. See also shaky found-footage Hollywood films, and amateur videos used on the news.) Some shots were even done blind, involving an arm suspended out the window with the hope of good framing and the fear of dropping the phone. Because of the process, many great shots were seen but not caught on camera — one missed moment was two sailors, caps to shoes in formal white dress, going past, in the opposite direction, two Muslim woman covered head to toe in black burkas).

The trees are an anchoring device for the photos — their cement planter an immutable piece of the landscape around which the activity flows, the stories occuring beside, behind, above, in, and around it. (Seen in context with the other photos, the trees even orient the images in which they don’t appear - for example, we know they are only steps away from the man lifting the barbell on the crosswalk, and just below the guy smoking crack on the balcony). The trees even become characters in the narrative, silent sentinels to the events occuring around them, still, but transforming with the seasons, central, but in the background — a metaphor for the artist-observer. (And the audience looking at the photos later, as they ‘virtually’ inhabit the same point-of-view as the photographer, watching the events unfold). A subseries within the Window focuses directly on the two trees as seen over the seasons, a nod to landscape art — the image devoid of people, an urban version of works by The Group of Seven.

The artist, sitting in a chair by an open window on the third floor, was visible, but the vast majority of the subjects where unaware of the camera. Some seemed to know though, while others were most definitely cognizant of it. The woman smoking marijuana with the pipe glanced left and right, sparked up, then discreetly looked up out of the corner of her eye right at the camera. An older man, talking to himself and wandering around and around the trees as he drank from an empty can, became aware of being observed, and gazed up frequently as he perambulated, pausing to study the window from various angles for long minutes. (The temptation to wave, to share a moment with anyone who looked directly at the artist, was powerful.) A family member coming to visit looked up and smiled. A friend of the artist, who knew about the ongoing project, walked by, stopped and struck a pose. The woman who set up an extremely bright ring light and tripod in the window of her room, curtains open, was most certainly aware of outside eyes as she performed for her online calls blatantly facing towards the numerous apartment buildings directly across the street. (A female friend visiting the artist noticed this woman across the way working in her window — in panties and t-shirt with the tripod and lighting rig — and jokingly made a gesture for her to flip her shirt up. The cam girl saw, and obliged).

The artist is also invisible. Autobiographical details can be gleaned from the images, glimpses into the life of the person taking all those photos at The Window, revealed via a sock on the sill, or a hand with a ring, or a partial reflection in the windows across the street, but also more fully, though imperceptibly, via the selection of subject matter in the images, and the idiosyncratic aesthetic choices made when taking them. If all art is autobiographical, then The Window is a selfie, distributed across dozens of images. A self-portrait of the artist, in a sense, by absence.

The rules: Take a maximum of four shots per ‘scene’ (often, only one or two could be taken). Try to frame them all in a similar fashion - or at least always capture the Trees in the scene somehow. Don’t wait by the window for hours. No use of automated observing (time lapse, motion detector, or web cam) — only shoot it if the event was spontaneously noticed. No special equipment; no zoom lens or extendable stick or tripod. Blurs from movement at night, or distance and low lighting, were okay — ambiguious details match the enigmatic moments (is the blurred face laughing or cursing; what is that smudged body in the middle of the street doing exactly?). Let the content overcome the clarity, like how the fuzziness of the famous 9/11 Falling Man photo, or the graininess of the Zapruder film, contribute to the feel or veracity of the unscripted scene, elevating it to a metaphorical truth beyond just simple documentation. (The range of clarity from photo to photo also contributes interesting textural, spatial and even temporal variation across the series, one perspective feeling like many).

Another rule was to be open to photographing everybody, not just something obviously interesting or that fit an emerging pattern or theme. Also, photograph “that person” if they show up again, because each subsequent image may reveal subtle truths about them, the situation, or time passing via the photo’s small differences. (Everyone’s life is an epic movie, to them. The photo of the dressed-up person walking away with donuts in-hand but coming back without them hours later in the opposite direction has plot). One more important rule was to not stick strictly to the Dogme-like rules — to capture the lightning strike, the artist had to break “the time” rule and sit for many hours for that split-second moment; the spider web caught looming over the city was at the fire exit, not The Window. The bending of “the view” rules led to a couple of sub-locations being developed further, from beyond just the Trees to the Balcony (featuring crack users, romance, book reading), the Crosswalk (a lot of fashion-of-the-day), the Stairs (celebrities, DJs, partiers), the Alley — the only non-Window point-of-view (drunken escapades, a break-in), and the Sidewalk directly below (all of the above).

More views led to a problem though, of Apocalypse Now proportions — too much footage shot. Only a few images within each existing moment were taken. However, if a moment is traditionally 90 seconds, there are over three-hundred-fifty thousand of them a year — and for the Window, the moment was, at most, 6 seconds (the time to walk past the two Trees), so there are therefore over five million possible opportunities! Adding five settings (Balcony, Crosswalk, etc) gives twenty six million two hundred and eight thousand possible moments!!! So predictably, some backlog of photos occurred. Photo editiing ended up being a very large part of the work, turning what were sponatenous micromoments into a ongoing marathon. Sometimes photos that fit a topic were edited immediately, while photos taken months earlier were worked on later (which mirrors another theme in the work: that time is non-linear, the past, present and future all really Now).

Sometimes the artist documented a sequence of photos of a singular moment, vignettes that reveal more of the plot or action [see these on Page 3] — a fist hurled toward and connecting with a face during a fight, like an Eadweard Muybridge study of motion. A woman circumnavigates the trees, balancing like the gymnast Simone Biles all around the narrow ledge while idly chatting on the phone. An unhoused man grooms himself for some time in front of a silver sign, styling his hair various ways. A young man changes multiple times in the mirror, does pushups, shadow-boxes, and takes a selfie to see how he looks before heading out to what is likely a romantic date. An older man, in the first act of his movie, recycles cans from the garbage (gulping the traces of remaining alcohol); in the second act he approaches and continuously interrupts the workers of a nearby beer delivery truck; and in the third act he climatically walks offscreen carrying a big bag of cans he has been handed by the charmed and laughing workers.

The Window is a 21st century silent film. Or: the photos are Tik Tok clips on mute. You don’t hear the barrage of noise from daily construction, the hourly wail of firetrucks or ambulances, the shrieks at night (joy? terror?), the come-ons of people trying to hook up after the club, the friendly conversation between waitng strangers, the loud threats of ass-kickings, the low rumble of the bass music of the convertible at the corner, the clanging of the streetcar, the gossip from a streetside phone call, the laughter on the balcony, the weeping in the alley. The listener gets to provide their own soundtrack — dialogue, sound fx, and score — for the imagined movie in each frame.

A subplot running through the Window series is another part of the third-millenium zeitgeist: our shift from the physical into virtual realms and augmented reality. Our experience of the world is already heavily mediated by technology. We selfie instead of looking in the mirror. At the football game we stare at the Jumbotron more than the field. We cook while YouTubing a video about cooking. We watch the bride walk to the altar through our cell phone, we livestream while hiking in the woods, we experience a local art exhibition only via Instagram. Our gazes are about to be altered (”augmented”) directly, conveniently, and full-time by technology: goggles, then glasses, then contact lenses and ultimately neural links. The Window, in a subset of photos, explores the early days of this, using commercial apps and AI on real-time events out the window. To contrast with the natural photograph capturing Venus and the Moon directly above the nearby construction cranes, an app was used to overlay a to-the-second-accurate map of the constellations in the sky. (Like ancient metadata, this exactly records the time and place the image was created, like how we know when the the Giza Pyramid was made due to its orientation to the stars). Snapchat was used to float virutal bubbles over the scene, Live Maps launched to show real-time floating directions, Instagram opened to stylize the shot with a suggested color filter, Lens harnessed to let machine-learning analyze and source the spot. The apps also track and store all the metadata (time/date/location) of the device used to take the photo — and of course database vast amounts of info on the person using it — so a screen shot of such metadata was also included in the series (Ironically, the very apps used for this part of the series will also help place the Window in time, as they likely will become tied to the era, eventually extinct or at least out-of-date, just like Kodak film or Betamax).

Another theme in the work is ‘metaphotography’. There are photos of the subject matter taking photos (like the police crime scene photographer, the bachelor party pics, the cam girl recording herself). There are photos of the artist in The Window being taken from the sidewalk by city surveyors; the artist capturing a self-portrait in the reflection in windows across the street; and photos of the Window photos being taken. There is even a photo of a photograph from space, using Google Earth as a shoe-string satellite to capture the location from a nearly identcial but virtual point-of-view. (All photos traverse time — though you see it in your now it always documents an event in the past — but the satellite sequence of photos “Inceptions” that… though they were shot by the artist during the timeline of the Window series, they actually record an image of the location taken two years earlier). And finally there are the generative adversarial networks (GAN) photos, synthethic images of the location, not actually taken but constructed from scratch by AI looking at comparitive Window photos for their creation.

The Window is also a collage. It can be perceived as a coherent single work comprised from a wide range of juxtaposed pictoral subject matter (covering a spectrum of time, ideas, narratives, color, clarity, texture) that arose from a long-look from one location. It could be compared to an ‘exquistie corpse’ piece, a participatory pictoral assemblage, if the subjects of the photos, though unwittingly, are seen as collaborators in the work. The Window is akin to the series of early linear collages created the artist, where separate hard-edge strips cut from diverse sources are placed edge-to-edge in a visual rhyme pattern (ImageA/ImageB/A/B/C/B/C/D…) to form a structured larger image. (For The Window, A’s content for they visual rhyme would be, say, Smokers, B’s Arguments, C’s Wealth, D’s Crowds and so on.) The photo series presentation gets its inspiration from another collage-like work by the artist: IOTA, which is one large painting in 30 discrete parts (each considered a separate work) that has infinite display possiblities — the 30 sections of that work are able to be shown in a single line, massed in a geometric shape, spaced in groups, or decentralized in single units around the room/building/or globe. This can be done with the images in The Window too, where each photo is a unit in the larger portrait (of the Times, of the City), like how pixels make up a JPEG. The Window could also be compared to the Polaroid photocollages by David Hockney, where a single subject (location, or person) is shown via dozens of photos taken at slightly different spatial perspectives, the frozen moments composited, time and movement therefore incorporated into the work. A final way to see the composte work is as a palmipsest, which is “something altered but bearing visible traces of its earlier form”, somewhat like an XY axis collage, but now with Z, layers over time. A city is a palimpsest, areas or bulidings effaced for newer ones, with earlier traces remaining (facades, bricks, street signs). The Window is a palimpsest, each photo, due to being taken over a span of time, a temporal information layer added to the overall work. (And with the background details in the images literally showing the erased city).

Are the photos in The Window art, journalism, simple documentary, or voyeurism? The images seem to capture unselfconscious behaviors, but in the day and age of the Handopticon (or Panoptiphone), where the cameras in every hand track, record and post everything, is any act done without an awareness of being observed? In a city with tens of thousands of windows on each block, and dozens of people out on the streets, there is an assumption that eyes are everywhere (even before phones) and that awareness may make every act in public performative. Are any actions, with our behaviours now so influenced by the possibility, threat, or opportunity of a social media post, ever authentic? Is everyone a Kardashian, curating themselves all the time? Everyone jumping the shark in their own personal sitcom, or dancing on the streetcorner for their IG reel? (Warhol was right on the 15, but wrong on the duration — he should have said 15 seconds, the length of a Tik Tok video). Just as when the spotflight falls from the sky, nearly killing Jim Carey’s charicter in the movie “The Truman Show”, have we all passed the moment when we think we are not being filmed? What is a private space, is a private moment in a public space possible? Besides all the smart phone cameras, there are security cameras everywhere — hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, parking lots, doorbells, CCTV polecams. Google shoots everything, from the streets to satellites. Do we have the rights to our own image, experience, ‘data?’. (With phones listening and uploading our location, health, search, and other information being studied by algorithms and AI, they know more about where we are going, physically and metaphorically, than we do ourselves). Do the police have the right? Does the government? Do the corporations? Does a stranger? No permission is needed to photograph someone in public. In New York a lawsuit against a photographer by condo-dwellers was dismissed because it was determined that the photos he took were for art not commericial reasons. Legal, but moral? If, in public, one does an action that breaks social mores, from possibly embarrassing to outright dangerous — squatting to pee in a well-lit alley, barfing into a neighborhood garbage can, screaming at 3am down the street, starting a fight, pulling hair, pulling a trigger, choosing to keep the curtains wide open when unclothed — should any presentation of the work (Instagram to museum) include facial blurs or black bars? If the person in the photograph is doing a performative act, to an audience of one or many, IRL or online, does that mitigate the context? If it is viewable from The Window, should it be documented?

EXHIBITION

The Window can be shown many ways for exhibtion, with many possible arrangements of the work —

By content, the photos grouped by:

  • Time: Date (from first photo to last), Hour (night/day), Season (winter, summer…)

  • Person (male, female, old, young., solo, crowd...)

  • Subject (weather, technology, fashion, wealth, humor, despair…)

  • Action (working, partying, walking…)

  • Aesthetic (color, perspective, clarity, patterns…)

  • Location (Trees, Crosswalk, Stairs…)

  • Rhythmic repeating pattern (ContentA/ContentB/C/D/E/F/A/B/C/D/E/F….) SEE IMAGE BELOW

  • Random Placement (viewer makes connections)

By shape, the body of work arranged:

  • Massed together (large groupings), i.e. 5 x 5 squares, or triangular shapes,

  • Distributed (spaced groups or single photos)

  • Linear arrangment, one long continuous line

  • Linear arrangement with arms branching off vertically for extended vignettes (with more photos from that moment, or thematically related) SEE IMAGE BELOW

The collection of digital photos can also be shown as new media (wall projection, LED screens, web exhibitions, NFT spaces…)

ABOVE: The work reads left-to-right as a film (strip), the extended branches like links to more information from a web page, and the gestalt on the wall as a sculpture.