A Year Out The Window
A Year Out The Window is a pandemic quarantine story, playful and plaintive, about the complex experience of living through a year in which life, paradoxically, both stood still and convulsed. All shot through a bedroom window, the photographs speak of isolation, endlessness, stillness. In turn, the image titles (each a reference to an event or experience of 2020) speak to themes of interconnectedness, commotion, and vertigo. The whole is a time capsule of sorts for a year that lay dizzyingly bare the rabbit hole we’ve dug ourselves into, leaving us to wonder if there’s even a way out — for which not forgetting is a start.
A Year Out The Window is a pandemic quarantine story, playful and plaintive, about the complex experience of living through a year in which life, paradoxically, both stood still and convulsed.
The self-preservation impulse that forced me into complete isolation for most of 2020 (because of a compromised immune system) was the same one that led me to photograph the view out my window nearly every day, in what became an aliveness ritual — regaining my footing, after losing all sense of normalcy, through the steadiness of the architecture, the predictable rhythms of empty buses keeping their routes and of windows turning aglow in the night, and the confirmation of life continuing from the ivy that pushed unconcerned past the boundaries of the window frame to impede my view.
Avoiding contagion did not provide a shield from distress, though. The American Psychological Association warned in late 2020 of a “second pandemic” — a nationwide physical and mental-health crisis deriving either from concrete loss or from the “ambiguous loss” brought on by the year’s multiple disturbances and stressors — that would continue long after the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic would be considered past, and current statistics indicate that prediction is being borne out. After a year fraught with sustained hypervigilance, rampant racial injustice, alarming extremism, a brutal election cycle, unsurprising civil unrest, the near-end of our democracy, widespread illness, and a criminal, heartrending death toll, we are living in collective trauma, and titling the project’s images was for me an exercise in processing.
The resulting work is an exploration of contrasts: time vs. endlessness, fear vs. safety, stillness vs. commotion, privilege vs. vulnerability, gravity vs. absurdity, and isolation vs. the interconnectedness that leads to shared trauma — that of witnessing, as that of experiencing. The whole is a time capsule of sorts for a year that lay dizzyingly bare the rabbit hole we’ve dug ourselves into, leaving us to wonder if there’s even a way out — for which not forgetting is a start.
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This project was included in the PhotoAlliance's Bay Area Current(ly) exhibition of 2020, and will soon be available in a limited-edition book.
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