As I acclimate to our new living quarters, I impulsively took some pictures of the morning light shining through the windows. As I was uploading them, I noticed a theme. I have done this often in the places where I live as the below history of images shows. The translucent but impenetrable properties of the glass in a house are so seductive. The panes allow light in, you to look out, protects from weather, vaguely reflects the surroundings. All of my photo’s are from the inside looking out rather than the outside looking in referencing a domestic, safe location from which I am shooting. If the photo’s were taken from the outside, it would likely recall a more voyeuristic tone–less safe, more creepy.

I used to trace the giraffe and elephant on the kid’s menu’s from Bill Knapp’s family restaurant (my family pretty much only went to Bill Knapp’s when we went out as a kid) by putting the paper on the window and drawing through to the other side. It’s difficult to recall if this was part of my thought process when I started taking photo’s of the magazine pages on the window, but I’m pretty sure the first drawing I made in my apartment in the Bronx (summer 2004), with the lamp under a glass table where I traced Jonbenet Ramsey’s face intermingling with some Keebler elves I was thinking about this “practice”.

Speaking of tracing, last night during the Artist in Residence lectures Iris Eichenberg (Metals at Cranbrook) was talking about tracing as re-experiencing the steps you have already taken. I really liked this as I have usually thought about it as copying or plagiarism. Anyway, I’m off topic from the window panes I began writing about. There are images to peer through below.

This is the first image I took of a magazine page on the window in 2007.