Windows - Patrick Pound

Patrick Pound collects photographs as if on a dare. For thirty years, the New Zealand-born, Australian artist has been collecting other people’s photographs and placing them in his own peculiar categories. To photograph the world is to collect it in the form of images. Pound’s work seems to propose: ‘If only we could find all the pieces, we might solve the puzzle.’ It is a folly, of course.

In Windows, Pound’s first photobook with Perimeter Editions, we find a cross-section of images lifted from a single category in Pound’s vast collection of 70,000 photographs. Each of the ‘found’ photographs in this new book features a window seen from the outside. We are allowed to look through them, from the privacy of our own homes. We see ghostly figures and happy families; we see actors acting, and everyday folks acting up; we see real and imagined worlds. Every scene is one of a kind. Page after page, we look through other people’s photographs and other people’s windows. Here, Pound reminds us that the photograph is a window posing as a mirror. Surprisingly, through its single constraint, Windows offers a little history of photography – its evolving material qualities and its practical and expressive uses.