What does it mean to visit a city you don’t know? How do you approach it? What does an encounter with a new place mean to you? How do you create your own space, your personal connection with the city – in this case, Prague?
As a visitor you might search for frames of reference, for memories of books you read with the city as the place of action, or for photographs that signify Prague for you. Joseph Sudek and Milan Kundera might be on your mind, or the beautiful book “La pleurante des rues de Prague” by the French writer Sylvie Germain.
Or maybe you will approach the city as an indexical sign of your presence there at a certain moment in time. You want to approach it, and in order to frame it, you look at windows. Windows are the frames that stand for the outside and for the inside. The inside is impossible to know, however.
Approaching a new city is always a fragmented experience. The "frame" provided by windows seems to be an attempt to overcome "fragmentation", but at the end of the day fragmentation is all you get. What you can apprehend by approaching a city is fragmentation, disseminations of thoughts, of subjectivity, of looking. The windows and the frames are illusory.
That seems to be the point of a journey through the windows of a city. The look evaporates at the same moment you touch the frame of the window with your camera.
You can only see the city through an infinite series of frames all endlessly removable.
Nevertheless, approaching Prague from windows or through photographed windows gives us the opportunity to look again and again differently. And maybe to position or to project ourselves within and outside a city that will stay elusive while giving us fresh looks all over again.
