Mediated View

Scenes glimpsed through a window, doorway, curtain, reflection or screen, so that whatever stands between becomes part of the picture.

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About

Many images show the world not directly but through something: a frame, a half-open door, a drawn curtain, glass or a mirror. The layer in between organises attention and admits that looking is never neutral. Dutch painters of the 17th century loved the device. Pieter de Hooch opened his courtyards and rooms onto further rooms through doorways, and Johannes Vermeer pulls a heavy curtain aside in The Art of Painting (c. 1666–68).

Romantic artists turned the window into a threshold of longing, as in Caspar David Friedrich's Woman at a Window (1822), seen from behind as she gazes out. In the city the barrier became the subject. Eugène Atget photographed Paris shop windows in which mannequins and reflected streets overlap, and Edward Hopper's Night Windows (1928) peers into a lit apartment from outside. Look for frames within the frame, and ask what they hide as well as show.