My Window

Bedroom Window, Wayne, New Jersey, 1975

Windows have a potency we silently acknowledge in their usage. As a child, my parents told me to keep my window open at night. It was good for me to breathe the fresh air. In ancient cultures, a window was opened at the time of death to release the soul to immortality.

The word “window” is derived from the old Icelandic word vindr, “wind” and auga, “eye.” Its literal meaning is a “wind-eye.” As windows have been called the eyes of the house, so the eyes have been called the windows of the soul. The “wind-eye” evokes the spirit of exchange, where inside and outside meet, bringing together elements of both.

Windows frame images of psychic potency. Images themselves act as windows to other realities. Dreams, memories, fantasies are windows on the psyche’s reality and the potentialities of the dreamer.

Amsterdam 2006

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4 thoughts on “My Window

    1. Rob Campbell

      Love the pix, Tim, the silhouette one is where I’d love to go these days had I but somebody to put up against the light. Truth to tell, I would really like to find a group of women willing to be photographed in their homes, doing whatever they want to do that looks pretty. It would be a more interesting self-assignment than more coke bottles!

      I may try to get this Leiter book, if it’s still around by the time I get around to doing anything about it:

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RTg9uUwEO54

      As with many such things, a lot of the pix already exist in other publications I already have.

      Keith: thanks for the plug; it reminds me that I had begun to revamp the site by putting some of the themes into a sort of book format. Unfortunately, I hadn’t quite realised how boring it was going to be to revisit the files and change them into that format, and I’ve lost the urge. I did do one set before being overwhelmed (the one before the link you supplied), but it’s going to take another, new, so-called project before I get back to the computer.

      Your Indian gent is timeless: he or a descendent will still be around in a hundred years, and look exactly the same. He/they were in place when I left the country seventy years ago… have you noticed how some face types have such a strong lineage? I don’t think I notice it as much with Caucasian features; maybe we lack something in the genetics department.

      1. Bob Todrick

        Twenty years ago I did a series nudes of women in their homes. None were models. Some were friends, some were people I would see in cafes. I’d politely approach them, explain my project and give them my contact info (along with my card that had my website at the time on it). I would explain that they images may be used in a gallery setting. I did not ask them for any contact info or even their name…I wanted them to no that there was no way I knew anything about them at this time.
        I’d say about 50% responded and ended up posing.
        But about 2005 or so everything changed…you could tell they didn’t feel comfortable that any images would not be splattered all over the internet.
        Too bad…I met some charming people, some of whom I am still in contact twenty years later.

        1. Rob Campbell

          Well Bob, at around the same time, possibly a little later, I produced some cards with a link to a new gallery in my website, called Unknown Beauties, wherein I’d posted a couple of street snaps of pretty women. I was intending to hand these cards out to anyone I thought might offer some photographic promise, and would let me shoot properly, not snatched.

          I showed the cards to my daughter and also to an English neighbour (both women, and unlike myself still living in Britain and the new ethos). To my surprise, they both expressed horror at my idea. They told me that my years of shooting professional models were obviously over, and that to ask strangers to pose was madness, now akin to sexual assault, and would possibly open me up to attempted extortion. The advice was to forget all about it and photograph cats instead, or take up the delights of ARAT.

          I have no interest in finding anyone to replace my late wife, and in my eighties it would be a waste of resources. I simply wanted to make pretty pictures, as I still wish that I could. I guess the dream just bubbles away under the surface since then, to reappear again whenever I see somebody else’s pictures like that. ;-(

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