Translucents (2004)

"The series Translucents is based on my observations on windows. At the first glance the windows seem clean and plain, but looking closer there are small flaws caused by time, like scratches and stains in surfaces or unclear shadows seen through dirty windows. This I find very fascinating: The way everyday life has changed the buildings from a vision of the architect to a place formed by its users is a very inspiring subject to me and by that it is also one of the main themes in my work.  I have photographed the windows from close distance. By doing this, I want to remove the recognizable characteristics of them and let the photograph become an individual item that is not associated with the object that I have photographed. By leaving out recognizable things, also the scale in these pictures becomes unclear. Some objects of these images exist in reality and some of them are scale models that I have built.

Through making these pictures I have started thinking more about space and how people read space in photographs. Usually the experience of space in a photograph is clear: It repeats its subject accurately, and by that it also repeats accurately the space that has been photographed. But what happens in the viewer’s mind when the necessary items needed for the perception of space are getting less and less in the picture? 

A photograph can never fully repeat the experience of being in a space, because it only can picture a certain part of it at the time. When there are no obvious spatial elements in the picture, the viewer starts actively creating them in his imagination. With this work I aim to an interaction between the viewer and the image: By re-interpreting my pictures, the viewer also re-invents the space pictured in them. Therefore my photographs are more like visual suggestions, not proclamations"

Ea Vasko