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windows on the world

Six cyanotypes on paper, 120x80cm, 2014

The images in this series are seemingly calm and mundane; they present a restaurant where people are peacefully seated. If the location is the same, the images come from various sources, whether they are advertising archives or private souvenir photos; they were collected, cropped and reassembled, and it is only by reading the title that we recognize the place: the Windows on the World, restaurant at the top of one of the towers of the World Trade Center; this identification disturbs the images, in a sort of retrospective projection, and gives them an atmosphere of imminent catastrophe, where the bluish figures become spectral, and appear facing the large bay windows, to be in a state of perpetual expectation. The accidents of the cyanotype, such as the liquid traces of the reactive solution and the brushstrokes, but also those formed by the layers and the glass plates which form so many frames in the image, and finally the vagaries of the revelation process allow to reconnect with pictorial forms in photography, and seem in a place which is no more, announce the flames and the dismantling by a catastrophe which contrasts with the apparent calm of the place and the characters.

 

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