The photographer's eye

The recurrence of images of real or fake screens, windows and frames in photography mirrors the pictorial motif of the window that Matisse, among others, made his own. A space beyond space. A window on the world. In a movement of its own, photography's window-screen device renders pictorial what is real. Now pure light, like Hiromi Sugimoto's drive-in cinemas, these window-screens - over-lit but empty, like the tunnel and billboard photographed by Xavier Dumoulin or Nathan Serny's windows - reflect and reflect the gaze of the observer. The same is true of the untied truck, where Tami Notsani sees "the quality of a mirror that frames and highlights a piece of the view that escapes us". "What escapes us" is a theme in itself. "Ambiguous atmospheres and hollowed-out landscapes", in the words of Siouzie Albiach. Architectures or urban furniture awaiting activation, out of use or out of time, abandoned for a time or forever. Orphaned, vacant, neglected spaces, where an impression of strangeness, sometimes desolation, reigns. An absence that reflects our own, like the blinding light of a screen without an image. Eminently pictorial. Cinematographic.