Views In not Out

– Or the Window as Metaphor

Photographs have always been seen as a window to the world. They afford a view of the past, give insight into private matters, make distant places and cultures visually tangible, and thus expand our visual experiences. When the window itself becomes a photographic motif, it usually assumes metaphorical meaning, yet in very different ways. What is more, a suspenseful relationship between actual space and pictorial space arises depending on where the photographed window is seen, and on its scale in relation to the surrounding environment. Sophie Thun has photographed windows for her work again and again. These images unfurl a particular effect in exhibitions, for in this space the artist stages life-sized renderings of the windows, or of the photographic material, in a compelling way.

When we installed the exhibition Sophie Thun – Trails and Tributes at the Kunstverein Hildesheim in May 2022, elaborate discussions ensued about which wall should host the piece Looking at the Window, Kabinett. Sophie Thun, my cocurator Torsten Scheid, and I decided as a team on the upper story of the Kehrwiederturm, the tower that is home to the Kunstverein. It has a big room with two window fronts situated across from each other. One faces downtown Hildesheim, and the other looks out over the swath of woods along Kehrwiederwall and the southern part of the city. I was at first skeptical and questioned whether it would be a good idea to add a third »view« to the room; I would have, in fact, preferred to cover one of the existing windows with Thun’s photograph. Torsten Scheid argued, however, that this would seal off the space too much, for surely many visitors would come to see the exhibition to enjoy the view of the city and the prospect of the surrounding environs. Also, technical challenges and the artist’s personal preference spoke against my proposal. I was outvoted and thought in passing of the phenomenon of exhibition visitors sometimes spending more time gazing out of museum windows than at the works of art. Out of which windows in this room would they look? So for the duration of the exhibition, the real Hildesheim windows were joined by a rendering of a Vienna window thanks to the work Looking at the Window, Kabinett. When walking through the Kunstverein up to the top floor, the Vienna window was already visible from the spiral staircase, initially only in part. Admittedly, it turned out to be a good decision, for Looking at the Window, Kabinett presents the optical illusion of a trompe l’oeil, with the artist probing the relationship between original and photograph. The curtailed view of the work while ascending the stairs heightened the illusionistic effect and once again intervolved places and times.

Looking at the Window, Kabinett was originally developed in 2020, for the exhibition Stolberggasse at the Vienna Secession. Sophie Thun had arranged to move her darkroom to the museum’s Grafisches Kabinett (Graphic Cabinet) to produce, on site, the work cycle All things in my Apartment smaller than 8 × 10 inch. The room had to be completely submerged in darkness for her work on this series. Not only did Thun conceal the window of the Grafisches Kabinett behind a light-proof curtain; she also photographed it with her large-format camera, exposed it in original size as a color print in a Berlin darkroom, and then installed the picture in the exact place where the actual window is situated. Similar to the life-sized map in Jorge Borges’s On Exactitude in Science, which covers up the charted landscape and makes it useless, the Kabinett’s window at the Secession lost its characteristic traits through this intervention. It only remained as a spatial element. The exhibition was thus expanded to include a work that exemplarily showed the working approach taken by Sophie Thun, and that enabled several questions about the medium of photography to be articulated, related for instance to the relationship between reality and likeness, to the role played by materiality in the meaning of an image, and to the temporality of photography.

Sophie Thun’s penchant for picturing her visual motifs in life size often goes back to her childhood visits to Catholic churches. In these places of worship she saw wall paintings which, through their visual perspective, reference the church’s architectural elements and expand them illusionistically. Aiming to initiate a similar play on optics, Sophie Thun developed a rule for her own work that either the rendered subject or the photographic material (specifically, the negative sheet) has to be reproduced on a one-to-one scale. She adheres to this rule so diligently that it takes on an impressive and, as in Looking at the Window, Kabinett, radical scope.

Looking at the Window, Kabinett has the dimensions of 385 by 700 centimeters. Sophie Thun created the picture using a large-format camera on a color negative sheet measuring 8 by 10 inches. The shot was taken during the day, at a time when the lighting was quite similar both indoors and out, so that both were exposed correctly and equally. In a darkroom, Sophie Thun exposed the image using a photographic enlarger that projected the photographs onto the opposite wall horizontally. Since the window and its likeness were so big and the darkroom wall in turn too small, this process was carried out in several steps on a total of five rolls of paper. The artist used photo paper on a 1.8-meter-wide roll, which she had to affix to a wall and roll out in utter darkness, with the aid of a laboratory assistant due to its width. But Sophie Thun did not simply carry out this process of developing the image according to the usual methods, which entails placing the negative in the enlarger, setting the color filter and exposure time correctly, attaching the paper, and then exposing and developing the image. Instead, by leaving performative traces on the photograph during the exposure process, she is using the darkroom as another site of artistic intervention and thus offensively challenging the conventional understanding of photography as a snapshot capturing a moment in time. Her pictures thus preserve not one moment in the past, but at least two: in Looking at the Window, Kabinett, for example, the moment of taking the photo in Vienna and the moment of exposing and printing it later in Berlin. During the exposure process, she stepped between the enlarger and the rolls of paper multiple times, making her hands and her head visible as white shadows, as well as she herself as the person producing the image. Corresponding to this activity in the darkroom are her interventions during the shot itself, which show the artist as author of the photograph along with her working process. At the right edge of the picture, it is Sophie Thun’s hand pressing the remote release. The cassette slider of her large-format camera is leaning against the window, and during the shot a test strip was hanging in the window frame and thus, being exposed one to one, becomes a trompe l’oeil in a trompe l’oeil. During the first presentation of Looking at the Window, Kabinett at the Secession, the moment captured in the image changed during the exhibition: by using the Grafisches Kabinett as a darkroom, the exhibition space was often lit by a red safelight instead of regular ambient lighting. This visually shifted the colors and the overall appearance of the print. The question of when an image is complete in terms of its physical manifestation was hence posed yet again.

Sophie Thun does not hide the materiality and the visual layering of her work. The paper rolls of Looking at the Window, Kabinett are only affixed at the upper edge, so they hang down next to each other, slightly overlapping, and the paper curls up at the bottom. In one spot, the photographic image of the Kabinett window is suddenly covered by a picture of the window in the Secession’s President’s Room. Designed as a mirrored building, the upper floor of the Secession boasts two structurally identical rooms, one of which serves as an exhibition space (Grafisches Kabinett) and the other as an office for the president (President’s Room). In the first, works of art are presented in a room open to the public and the furnishings are meant to be neutral, while work related to the fundamental organizing and content of these exhibitions is carried out in the second, inaccessible space. This second room has a certain patina about it. Not only the green-hued walls or the now historic radiators tell the story of the building. A glimpse into the past is also afforded by an artwork hanging above the window, where interesting connections can be drawn to Sophie Thun’s artistic work. The piece Grey Scale, Bouquet VI by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij was created in 2005 in the context of their exhibition at the Secession as an annual gift for members. De Rijke and de Rooij photographed, in black and white, each of the flowers of a bouquet in their exhibition. In the prints, the flower heads take on an air of being life sized. The photographed flowers are meticulously sorted according to brightness, giving the image a generous width of 595 centimeters. The sober arrangement of the flowers according to grayscale removes the floral composition of the bouquet of flowers and incidentally negotiates one of the most crucial themes in photography: the question of an adequate translation of color into grayscale. Though color photography has long since become dominant, color-correct reproduction remains an ongoing challenge for the medium.

The motif of the window lends itself to associations with the first known shot in the history of photography. In 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce photographed the view from his study in Saint-Loup-de-Varenne, France, with a camera obscura. With an exposure time of eight hours, he made the image called Point de vue du Gras (View from the Window at Le Gras) as a heliograph on a tin plate coated with natural asphalt. Presumably quite unintentionally, in Niépce’s work the image carrier is also visible and influences the perception of the motif. With rounded edges and a non-exposed rim around the fixed image, the plate displays damage such as dents, scratches, and corrosion. Niépce was mostly concerned with using photochemical means to capture the view, so it can be assumed that his selection of motif had more practical reasons. Thun, in turn, wanted to keep windows in the exhibition space, so for her the obvious solution was to adopt the form of photographic representation. While Niépce’s photograph shows the view of his Le Gras estate, with the window not discernible except for the sash, Thun chose to concentrate on the window frame in her photo. The views of the Karlsplatz (from the Kabinett) and the Naschmarkt (from the President’s Room) are thus slightly blurred. In this way, the artist directs perception to the window as a framework that delimits our gaze as does a photograph.

Sophie Thun has taken up the motif of the window in different projects, pursuing various objectives. In her first solo exhibition in 2018, at Galerie Sophie Tappeiner in Vienna, she installed a life-sized likeness of herself in the gallery’s glass door. In this photo, titled Rain on Pane, she was holding the remote shutter release in one hand and the slider of the large-format camera in the other. The artist encountered the passersby with a concentrated expression on her face, while the gallery exhibition remained vaguely visible in the background. Upon entering the gallery, visitors were directly confronted with this picture of the artist; one basically had to slip past her in order to delve deeper into the rest of her pictorial world.

The piece Kettenbrueckengasse 23 zu Westbahnstrasse 27–29, 2020–2022 tells of the friendship between Daniel Spoerri and Sophie Thun, and also of two working places. Inscribed in the title is a transition between two addresses in Vienna where Sophie Thun has had a darkroom set up. She visually translates this transition by layers several images atop each other. A window from Thun’s current Vienna studio is visible. Hanging up to dry in this window is a large-format negative on which another large-format negative is pictured. This second negative shows a view of Daniel Spoerri’s studio before he gave it up due to advancing age. Charged with symbolism, the word »Remember« is printed on a sheet of paper seen hanging above a mirror. In absence of another available location, Sophie Thun had moved her darkroom to Spoerri’s studio for a while. The view of Westbahnstrasse is blurred here, too, with two sites connected so that the present day in the new studio is overlaid by a view into the past.

Another work involving a window as a determinant motif was recently created the scope of an exhibition at Galeria Madragoa in Lisbon. While the exhibition space was being rearranged for Sophie Thun’s show, the gallery had taped tissue paper over the windows so that passersby could not look in. This situation of a blocked view is preserved in Covered (paper folded on paper unfolded) (inside to outside, Rua do Machadinho 45 Zvs.P). At the bottom left of this image, references resembling a still life are made to the artist’s creative activity, taking the form of an arrangement of a light meter, a magnifying glass, and, again, a cassette slider from a large-format camera. The two zigzag patterns at the lower image border speak of the developing process. Since the enlarger projects the image horizontally onto the wall, Sophie Thun fixates the negative sheet with tape, which has clearly been taken from a dispenser. She does not conceal this necessary action, instead making it a part of her pictorial program. Strips of tape are also evident in Looking at the Window, Kabinett, yet because the work is so large they are easy to miss. In the exhibition, the window sealed off by tissue paper extends the situation of converting the space well into the actual exhibition period. It indirectly thematizes work on an exhibition as process, one that generally remains hidden from the visitors.

At the Kunstverein Hildesheim, Hildesheimer Ecke (Hildesheim Corner) was installed opposite Looking at the Window, Kabinett. Newly commissioned for this exhibition, the piece places a corner center stage, a spatial element that is diametric to a window in terms of function, for walls that meet serve to close off the view instead of open it. They mark the boundary of the visible instead of facilitating a view into the distance. All the same, Sophie Thun’s photograph of the corner of a room is used in the exhibition space in the same way as her photograph of the window at the Secession in Vienna. Hildesheimer Ecke, too, covers its real counterpart with a likeness. In order for Thun’s print to work as a spatial copy, the wooden flooring and the height and breadth of the fire extinguisher had to be measured. The artist guesstimated the color of the floorboards from memory when she was in the darkroom. Despite her intense focus on precision, the photographed corner collides with the appropriated corner in more than one spot. The original fire extinguisher is positioned next to its photographic copy as if begging for comparison and, in 3D, resists being photographically flattened. In this work, too, the artist widened her role to more than just pressing the shutter button. Indeed, during the exposure process, she squatted down between the enlarger and the photo paper, resulting in her shadow gracing the image. In relation to Looking at the Window, Kabinett, here an exciting dialogue emerges about how site-specific works in the oeuvre of Sophie Thun interact, and about how our own perception of photographs in relationship to the real world needs to be continually rebalanced in the process.