Taciturn windows

I have always loved windows, mine or those of others, I have often photographed them, fantasising about what unknown lives might be unfolding inside them, or what extraordinary horizons might lie outside them.

The image of the window is evocative, it is a conduit between worlds: the intimate one of one’s own home, which is a projection of ourselves, and the world outside, or from outside to the universes of others.

But windows can also close or hide the emptiness within them, or be opaque and non-transparent, then the symbolism is reversed: they become emblems of the difficulty of interacting with others, even if only on the level of reverie.

Even so, they are beautiful and useful in synthesising the atmosphere of a world that is less and less supportive, capable of empathy, if it ever was at any point in history.

Our cities have closed windows, like our eyes, which are not called ‘windows of the soul’ for nothing, and if any are still lit up, they only seem to betray an absence.

Without drama though, it is only this world that grows old, and I with it. If the windows no longer speak, with the series of images in this work, I can try to bring back their new silence with some lightness.

On the flap of Franco Vegliani’s splendid novel ‘La frontiera’, which I had bought on a stall, I found scribbled in pencil these few verses by a stranger, not coincidental to that book, which I think also apply to this work: