I have mentioned several projects in the past here that use the window as a mechanism for photographic discourse. There are quite a few mentions of the window as a source for inspiration; perhaps the most well-known is eminent curator John Szarkowski’s discourse about mirrors and windows, and the difference between how an artist is a projection of the world, versus the mirror as a self-evident form of an inner subjective way to express the world through photography, in paraphrase. Another Szarkowski quote refers to the window as a material way to disseminate the materiality or conscious construction of the window in relation to photographic discourse…

The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It’s not like ivory, tapestry, bronze, or oil on canvas. You’re not supposed to look at the thing, you’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window.

Many photographic projects have used the window, particularly for shooting outward from it. The first that always comes to mind is Ruth Orkin’s 1960s and 70s documentation of New York life outside of her Window. Orkin, known tangentially as a street-level photographer before this work, exemplifies a significant voice in the history of photography, and her work from her window is an interesting shift in POV from other artists’ work, such as Helen Levitt, whose work focused on the street’s horizon. From the same city, and slightly earlier, Carl van Vechten also made photographs from his studio window, which is incredibly interesting given the photographic portraiture made within the studio.

Keeping with the same geography, though paradoxically shifted, is Nick Waplington’s studio photography, in which light cascades across studio surfaces, particularly his paintings, which glow. This attitude toward using the window’s light as a source of image-making also manifested in Guido Guidi’s Preganziol (1983). Similarly, though in Europe, Seichi Furuya’s photographs of his wife, Christina, are also bathed in a soft, honeyed glow before her untimely death by suicide. The window thus reflects the outside and inside worlds. Vera Lutter and Abelardo Morel have also used the window to capture, via pinhole, using its technical camera obscura.

The two most historically significant examples are probably Niepce’s View from the Window at Le Gras, from 1826/7 of an outdoor shot, and Daguerre’s “Boulevard du Temple” photograph from 1839, in which a man stops to have his shoes shined on the boulevard. I might also suggest “Man Dying on the Streets, 1932” by Brassaï as an exciting series of images bearing events surrounding the title. More recently, Hayahisa Tomiyasu’s TTP —an obsessive, durational view of the life of a ping-pong table in his European flat —also qualifies. In short, there is no small history of the window in photography, and many, many other examples pervade.

What I find interesting in the work of Orkin, Hayahisa, and now Gareth McConnell is the interest in how one remote position, focused outside of the window, shooting download can form new bodies of work or take on a type of street photography, while also disobeying one of the fundamental POVs of the genre, namely the horizon line. While shooting downward to capture the goings-on of civic and social life, the photographer does, though perhaps not emphatically, take on a bird’s-eye and omniscient view of the world. It does not look at the street’s horizon lines, but denies them completely, and in doing so transposes potential discussions about authority, even when they are not qualified as intentional. It cannot be disregarded that there is also a form of sniping in this shift of POV.

With Gareth’s new book Window, published by his Sorika publishing house, what I find incredibly interesting, beyond his continued excellence in image-making, is that he has found a way to question the ephemeral toil of people below. The street is, after all, a conduit for human direction, and by shooting out his window, with his grainy, beautiful color palette, one feels a sense of transcendence: that life at speed is so very fleeting, yet sublime. It is a profound observation about the beury of our short time together on this spinning ball of rock and the Irish artist, British city-liver of London has captured an essence of our continued movements and sacrifices of work, movement, and has choreographed it in a beuatiful way that suggests, loss, through dissolve, a dance under canopies and signs, that reminds us of what is above, but also the power of that position to make grandiose observation.

If you are familiar with McConnell’s books, you will know this is another brilliant body of work in his never-ending catalog of hits. I am fortunate to have most of his books and find them enigmatic, sublime, and his constant observations of grainy dissolve worthy of much more attention than he receives. On the note of grain, I felt this type of excitement more recently in Mara Palena’s Oikeiôsis and Anna Breit’s Look Book 01, but can also stretch it back to Paul Graham’s End of an Age, as well as some of Jurgen Teller’s work from the late 1990s and early 200s. It’s refreshing to see people pulling at the grain again. This was a joy to receive, and it marks another significant moment in the artist’s work life. It’s simple, refined, but never lets down or becomes boring. In fact, the variance within the images should be noted, as he has found a way to make the quotidien monumental—highest Recommendation. Pick it up!