The photographic series Window (2015), describes windows in the Netherlands and is concerned with the relation between image and visibility. The Dutch window has a long and fascinating tradition in Dutch social history, with it being strongly related to the relationship between classes, and with women and domestication.
The window is also a saturated concept within the history of art and visual discussion. Sometimes, as Leon Battista Alberti’s famous metaphor described, it is a frame; an open window to look thorough at the world. Other times it is a screen; a surface mirroring or representing a fragment of the world. It is a border between the open and closed, inside and outside, depth and the flatness of surface.
The windows on streets in the Netherlands present endless options for different kinds of images, as they are images set for the outside world by the inhabitants of the houses setting their displays on the windowpane. In this way, the windows appear as “three-dimensional theater boxes”: the shelf behind the glass is the stage, the curations on either side or in the background and the glass function as the symbolic separation between inside and outside, the stage and the viewer. The glass also becomes a fourth wall, transparent but also mirroring, a surface where in the process of looking through it, the viewer might sometimes see his own reflection in it.
To capture this, in this series, the camera offers a completely parallel viewpoint as the window from a fixed distance, stressing the flatness of the image. The image describes an isolated and minimal wall with a window in its center. In this way the window looks like a framed picture hanging on a wall. The camera as a framing device adds to the sense of a frame within a frame. The constructed display set from inside the house includes the random reflection of the outside world on the same surface. The light and reflection of the outside world is the spontaneous and ever changing element of time.