FORGOTTEN VIEWS

A window is a promise. It says that the world goes on out there. FORGOTTEN VIEWS gathers the views of abandoned places, glimpses through broken panes, open doors and empty balconies of a world that turns on without them.

These views were once an ordinary part of the day. Someone drank the first coffee of the morning here and looked out without really looking. Someone stood at the window waiting for another to come home. Someone built this house for this view alone and set the opening in the wall where the valley ran widest, the water came closest, the sky opened largest. The view was the reason, and it stayed when everything else went.

Today the failing architecture frames the landscape like a picture. The window frame without glass, the doorway without a door, the balustrade with no one behind it: they turn the look outwards into a look inwards. You stand in the dark of an abandoned room and see into the light, and for a moment you are both at once, the one who is lost and the one who longs.

This series is about what a view does to us. It promises distance and gives calm, it shows where you might go and keeps you standing where you are. The landscape outside knows nothing of time, the room inside knows nothing else. A threshold lies between the two, and these pictures are made on that threshold.

FORGOTTEN VIEWS is an invitation to pause. To feel the longing that lies in every view, and the quiet melancholy of prospects that were once taken for granted and seem all the more precious now that no one is left to see them.