photography

up the long slide (even jack black)

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TL; DR: below the surface & to the sun (Verticality, Part Two, by K.I.A.)

The original “Verticality” image arrangement (post) became concrete because of a synchronicity. I’d selected a series of photos of ephemeral moments — of disparate content, and taken with separate intents — which were captured over the course of a year, and then grouped them by elevation (how far the subject was from the ground). A vertical visual poem.

Just after I’d curated that grouping, by chance, I came across the poem “High Windows” by Philip Larkin. Here’s its last stanza:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The poem’s last stanza resonates with the themes of The Window (continuity, infinity, with hints perhaps of both despair and transcendence… ). And, of course, the main hook was that all the photos in this series (of series) are, literally, taken from a high window.

So I used the poem as the connecting thread for that first post some time ago, but for a while now I’ve wanted to do a Verticality sequel. (Or… or maybe a franchise, at some point merchandising the IP with toys, maybe a gin or a tequila line, and possibly a cologne or a perfume — with signature top notes of transcendence, and base notes of despair). But I’ve held off for dittophobia.

Then a few days ago, out of nowhere, this famous line popped into my head:

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND READ MORE (SUBSCRIBE!) AT THE K.I.A. SUBSSTACK HERE

All The Hills Echo Ha Ha He He (The Window by K.I.A. pt 54)

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An angst-antidote — excerpts from Songs of Innocence by William Blake, paired with images from The Window photo installation series:

Merry, merry sparrow!/Under leaves so green/A happy blossom/Sees you, swift as arrow,/Seek your cradle narrow, /Near my bosom
-THE BLOSSOM

Pretty joy! / Sweet joy, but two days old. / Sweet joy I call thee: / Thou dost smile, / I sing the while; / Sweet joy befall thee!
-JOY

When the meadows laugh with lively green, / And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene; / When Mary and Susan and Emily / With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!
-THE LAUGHING SONG

What's the Point?

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(imperative, declarative and metonymic oh my!)

TL; DR: just see the point(s) ☟

Humans learn to point around 15 months of age (related to language development), first using their whole hand, then, three months later, by extending their index finger. Infants first do imperative pointing (i.e. to ask for a toy too far away or a sweet they want), and declarative pointing, (i.e. to indicate something new or interesting, like a dog entering the room.)

Animals don’t point. This includes mammals with fingers, like simians. However, even though they don’t point in the wild, when in captivity gorillas and chimpanzees learn how to do it from humans. Dogs understand pointing (from thousands of years of interacting with people — cats, also domesticated, just can’t be bothered), as do dolphins (perhaps because their echolocation “beam” is a sonic type of pointing).

There are numerous ways of pointing: semiotic primitive; pseudo-pointing; syntactic; cross-species litmus test… (see “Fifteen Ways of Looking at a Pointing Gesture” by Kensy Cooperrider for more of them.) Metonymic pointing is where you use the gesture to draw attention to an abstract concept — for example, a stressed staffer points to their watch to signal to the malapropping President answering questions it’s time to go; a heartless developer points to your home to indicate a proposed subway and condominium development… ):

Pointing can be difficult to interpret — for example, if you are wordlessly communicating with a person who doesn’t speak your language and you point to an apple, are you drawing attention to its color, its shape, your hunger? If you point to it three times, are you indicating a different attribute each time?

SEE THE REST OF THE “POINTING” SET, W/TEXT, HERE: https://nu4ya.substack.com

Nuns to Gnostics (Buddha, Baphomet, Jah, Jesus, Yahweh, Waheguru... ) The Window pt. 51 by K.I.A.

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All the below so close (within a 15’ area), and not so far apart.

On the autumnal equinox the woman above and five others danced through the streets at sunset, wearing flower crowns, celebrating Mabon (“The Witch’s Thanksgiving”) in honour of nature’s abundance.

“May good thoughts come to us from all sides”, a Hindu prayer.

A Sikh principle is sarbat da bhala (“the welfare of all” or “may everyone prosper”)

This woman is going to a Powwow (an Indigenous gathering to celebrate culture, tell stories, sing, and perform traditional dances) somewhere downtown. On her regalia is the circular Four Directions symbol (white N, red S, yellow E, black W), one meaning of which is the interdependent relationship between all living things.

The tefillin is a small black box containing verses from the Torah, worn by Orthodox and traditional communities by wrapping the attached leather straps around the arm and forehead. The purpose is to keep one’s focus on spiritual development, not worldly desires.

An Apostle …...

READ AND SEE MORE ABOUT THIS SET OF IMAGES FROM THE WINDOW AT: SUBSTACK (and subscribe and share!)

Get the entire Nuns to Gnostics set HERE (and other sets HERE)

The Window as “networked” installation showing complex connections across images, time, people…

heart cave in (so much beauty in the world)

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“I need to remember … Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.” — Ricky Fitts (American Beauty, plastic bag scene)

objectifying, fetishizing, aesthetizing, anesthetizing, romanticizing, othering, ignoring, apotheosizing, burlesquing, proselytizing presenting


Image 1 and final bookend image (14): Garbage Truck in Blue and Red taken 3 am, with found lighting from a strobing ambulance attending a close-by calamity

This post’s haiku:

white specks of snow fall
black bag shiny wrinkled worn
man wears to keep warm

Some bottles throughout art history: Roderick O’Conner (Still Life With Bottles), Cezanne (Still Life With Peppermint Bottle), Warhol (Green Coca-Cola Bottles), Ai Wei Wei’s Untitled 1993 (Song dynasty sculpture inside a whiskey bottle), and er, Jeff Koons’ Dom Perignon bottles (“some of the most affordable Koons works on the market”)

Title: Still Life, With Bottles

Title - After A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Jeff Wall ((After Hokusai))

The nightclub at the back of the alley stashed their empty bottles in a former apartment below us (the building was being vacated for condo demolition); they weren’t officially paying rent for the space, so it didn’t have locks…

SEE THE REST OF THE SUBSTACK HERE (AND SUBSCRIBE!): LINK

Protest! Antitest!

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Signs & Flags & Tees & Trucks of the times

FOUND WORD POEM:

We stand
as one — we will not comply;
from the river to the sea,
just say,
no, don’t believe the lies —
essential liberty,
hugs, temporarily blocked,
50% off,
can’t we just all get along
(subject to court injunction),
we will fight in the court. Hibachi
…cont’d at the link below

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND POST AT THE K.I.A. ART SUBSTACK HERE

ᴉuʌǝɹsᴉou <-> inversion (a la Graham & because Baselitz)

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TL; DR: if the sky were ground
(ʇɥǝ Mᴉupoʍ by K.I.A., p.50)

“New York City 1 (After Mondrian)”

For 75 years, the Mondrian painting “New York City I” (a grid of red, yellow, blue, and black linear adhesive tapes) was hung upside down. Research eventually proved that it should be shown the other way around. However, due to possible damage, the painting would continue to be displayed the wrong end up. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story,” said curator Meyer-Büser in 2022. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious” (italics mine):

“New York City 1” (Mondrian): Left: right; Right: wrong

Georg Baselitz is famous for exhibiting his paintings upside-down — or rather, right-side up, but with the subject matter inverted — to create unease and/or to make the content more difficult to interpret. His first inverted painting was in 1969, “The Wood on Its Head”. Flipping a traditional landscape of a tree made the work overcome representation, its artificiality highlighted, and left-brain analysis of it disrupted. The subject of the art was not as important as the work’s visual insight. It is immediately obvious that the tree, or in later works, the human being, is not the right way up. Genius, or gimmick? Bravado, or branding?

"Untitled" (Baselitz) - "Titled" (K.I.A.)

Rodney Graham is well-known for his photographs of trees hung upside down. (This presentation method evolved from his use of camera obscura, where a pinhole in a wall is used to isolate and cast the image —upside down and reversed, because light travels in a straight line — at large scale onto a facing wall). Of these works Graham said “I was also using a kind of readymade strategy based on the disputable assumption that a photograph is not art but an upside down photo is.”

"Welsh Oaks #1" (Graham) - "City Trees Two" (K.I.A.)

Some of the photos for The Window project/portrait/installation were shot upside-down. This was due to: 1) mistake, 2) the need to see around an obscuring object, like overhead wires, 3) not wanting the subjects to change their behaviour as a result of noticing the photographer’s movements 4) wanting to stay alive. (Meaning sticking the camera out the window without looking in order to avoid stray bullets from shootings, prevent rocks thrown from drug dealers or molotov cocktails from motorcycle gangs, and not garner a deadly look from that socialite after she stole flowers from a planter).

These images would usually be re-oriented when editing… unless visually it would enable two or more simultaneous readings — that is, a perceptual shift: is the skater dropping down into the flowerbed as if descending from a balcony above, or across it, launched towards the bottom of the photo from a crash…

READ & SEE MORE about the “Inversion Set” from The Window by K.I.A. (& SUBSCRIBE) AT THE SUBSTACK HERE

Grand Theft Photo (Appropriation, OK!)

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A.I. poison & Prince-ly appropriation by K.I.A. (TL; DR: stolen shoots (The Window 47)
(PRINTS HERE & BY REQUEST)

In the ‘80s Richard Prince rephotographed a famous cigarette ad (the iconic cowboy riding a horse), cropped out the text, and presented it as his own work. By recontextualizing it, he transformed the shot into capital-A Art.

Appropriation art was not a new idea — Sturtevant’s painting repeats, Warhol’s soup cans, Duchamp’s urinal, and so on, probably back to the second-ever cave painting. But Prince’s appropriation did, and still does, stir up controversy.

Concerns of copyright, fair use, “added value” (changing the original enough to call it a new work), originality, authorship, ownership, effort, legacy, history, and of course acknowledgment and compensation are even more of a concern now that text-to-image A.I. can generate (appropriate) any style of art or artist you want. “Generate a Frank Lloyd Wright drawing”, “Make a painting in the style of Basquiat”.

Unlike Prince, all the photos in this post appropriate (hijack) the event not the shot. With the staging stolen, the images are recontextualized. They are candid pictures of other people’s mediated messages. They are meta-photos of a crime scene, an advertising campaign, a tv production, an Only Fans session, a fashion shoot, a text home, a family album, wedding photos, dating app pics, Instagram posts, TikToks (with faux paparazzi), and selfies, selfies, selfies…

The Geometries of Taylor Swifties (THE WINDOW by K.I.A. pt 45)

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TL; DR: Taylor Swift Dance Party participants, in polygons (PRINTS HERE & BY REQUEST)

I hear shrieks outside. It’s early evening, spring. Shouts, cries, and loud exclamations in big cities are alarming… but in rare cases, like this, they are joyous — the sounds from down below The Window are emanating from a flock of Swifties, in line for a Taylor Swift Dance Party. They are laughing loudly, and eager to shake it (off).

According to statistics, there are about a shibillion Swift fans worldwide. Here are a few of them — sequinned, blue-jeaned, braided, cowboy’d, lumberjacked — free-range, in their various geometries:

SEE THE REST OF THE PHOTOS AND SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTACK click> HERE

IMAGES:

heXXagram

acute triangle

90,100, 60, 120 degrees of swifties

quadrilateral non-parallelogram with purses

biPhonic right angle

15 degrees ensequinned

theoretical investigations on geometrical structures of swiftie clusters


Geometries and glyphs of fans and fame, and the infinite mystery and magic of celebrity — Taylor’s a symbol, or sigil, for positivity, that’s why the lineup.

I go downstairs and join it.

love vector

I shriek a little (but joyously).

The Window w/ Swifties Geometries

NOTES:

-“Siri, Siri, in my hand, who is the famous-est in the land?”
“Taylor Swift, Of Course, is the famous-est in the land. There were 10,751,000 searches for her on Google this month, twice as many as the next famous-est, Ronaldo.”

- in the pic w/the pink cowboy hats, if you could “enhance enhance enhance” (as they do in movies) the girl’s iPhone image on the right, you’d see me leaning out the topmost window, 25’ above, taking photos. The only person to actually notice my actions was the girl who gave me the peace sign.

-The Window (all images in the photo series 24/7/365. from the one window) is mostly about interconnections across single images over a span of time. This post is one of the few showing multiple photos of a single moment (others were of a shooting, and a fire; while How Far the Man and UHaul Psalm were multiples of a single subject, but across a span of time.)

-the panoramic photo shows a few people in the lumberjack phase

-re: Google AI debacle, I queried it to generate images of a Swiftie & it made this:


-apparently the next Taylor Swift album “The Tortured Poets Department” comes out April 19 2024. So I asked Chatgpt to write a tortured haiku using Swift song titles, and it gave me this: Endgame without you / Haunted by blank space, lost love / Teardrops on my guitar

The Girl. The Vampire. The Murder. The End. (The Window photo series pt 46)

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TL; DR: serendipitous scenes for imagined movies (The Window pt 46)

PRINTS FOR ALL PHOTOS IN POSTS HERE: LINK

An animé character escapes from her simplistic cartoon into the real world to see a rainbow, fall in love, have sex, fart, and sword fight, not necessarily in that order, before she gets rewritten.

After a simple pitch goes horribly wrong, the surviving salesmen begin to suspect that one of them faked their Six Sigma sales-course certificate.

MORE — SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES FOR THE BELOW AT K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE: LINK

An influencer unwittingly records a murder in the window behind her and has to outsmart the criminals, the cops, the CIA, and social media to stay alive and get a brand sponsorship…

The motorbike. The heist. The woman. The betrayal. The chase. The roadblock. The discussion about Plato’s cave, simulation theory, and whether AI-generated virtual realities should be pre-decolonized by large language models rewriting user requests. The shootout. The end….

With a murder about to occur in the fishnet industry, six undercover policemen — one Black, one Indigenous, one white, one South Asian, four Women, two LGBTQ2SIA+, one Questioning, one and a half Deaf, and two from Quebec, one of them a curve model and the other Muslim — investigate.

Time-tourists travel back from the far future in their Chronobago only to find they are tiny in size compared to 21st century humans, and are also parked illegally. After their argument with the traffic cop goes viral on WorldStarHipHop, they must evade competing oligarchs muscling them to start a podcast, do a terrarium residency in Vegas, use their tiny hands in artisanal cobalt mines, and/or tell them how much Bitcoin is going to be worth in two years, not necessarily in that order, all before their impounded temporal recreational vehicle is sold off at a police auction, stranding them hundreds of years from home.

LL Cool J’s elite NSA vampire SEAL team secretly reunites to stop a shadowy cabal of NWO WEF scientists from using AI to hijack the CERN collider in order to flatten the Earth into a 15 minute city, but first they must trace some NFTs back to ISIS, battle UN undeads, avoid NASA NPCs, and race to stay ahead of international sunrises.*

An unemployed and depressed android comes to Earth to find work at Chick-fil-A, win at Chemin de Fer, and take up capoeira — oh, and stop the apocalypse with his rabo de arraia.

A man lives with no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,** necessarily in that order.

The angel Raguel comes to Earth to decide The End and sees that things are pretty good actually compared to every other era ever, so flies back to heaven.

NOTES:

-*Rotten Tomatoes review by RoyalWee2 for Vampires VS: IV — 🍅 “Good, but not spectacular enough, nor intimate enough, to really impress us. We get fatigued (although it is LL’s most relatable performance since episode 133 of NCIS: Hawai’i)”

-** from Thomas Hobbes' book Leviathan, 1651 (not coming soon to a theatre near you)

-for the international readers, the equation for Chronobago is: Time + Winnebago

-”Chemin de Fer” is a form of the gambling game baccarat, which is also known as punto banco; coincidently, all three have been used as nom de queere on Rupaul’s Drag Race; two by contestants, and one by a judge (Punto Banco.) “Rabo de arraia” is a capoeira kick, inverted and over the head, like a stingray’s strike. It was not used as a pseudonym on Drag Race. (It was used in “Pose” season 3 for a side character).

-good news: because the film has been pre-decolonized, the Academy has awarded the “Untitled Fishnet Crime” movie a 2025 Oscar

-”The chase. The desert. The shack. The girl. The roadblock. The end.” is the famous tagline on the original movie poster for the 1971 film Vanishing Point

-The angel. The descent. The judgement. The end.

-as always, all the photos are of real people caught in candid moments as they walk by The Window, (with no photoshopping, just color adjustments), and are the art, with the words (these words) always subordinate — especially when they are humorous. or "humorous”. (See the “How Far the Man” post for something more serious. Or “serious”.)

-the inspiration for this post came after seeing the above be-suited business guys walking just like:



Bonus image: (pinch up to magnify the billing block easter eggs):



The end.

happiness like motion!

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TL; DR: bodies, rest & motion (The Window photos project by K.I.A. Part. 44)

golden shoes:

“Lie back…” says the meditation instructor. “Feel the weight of gravity on your shoulders…your spine… your legs. Take a long slow breath.” I do. “Become stillness.” I don’t. I mean, how could you — the planet* is spinning like an enormously torqued merry-go-round, trying to fling us off at 1000 miles per hour! The Earth is also racing around the sun at 67,000 mph, like a desperate-to-win interplanetary NASCAR driver on the final lap. Not only that:

night rider

Our solar system is careening around the centre of the galaxy like a meth-snorting dirt biker loop-de-looping inside a metal sphere at the county fair at 492,126 mph. Our galaxy is spinning like an overclocked whirling dervish at 600,000 mph, and oh, by the way also hurtling outwards at 372 mph. (Oops, wait, that’s per-second. It’s actually 1,300,000 mph**).

incredible lightness of wheelieing

And OMG, even space itself moves — the entire universe is expanding like a (well, like a universe expanding so insanely they measure it per million light years) at 357,000 miles per hour/mly………

SEE/READ THE REST HERE: LINK

PRINTS OF THE WINDOW AT THE STORE / inquire HERE: LINK

in praise of fails: Weatherworks - land art installations by K.I.A.

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TL; DR: 30-foot art done-30° (“The Window” winterlude)

On Horizons

The newly frozen bay, somewhat snow white, sounds out as it warps — ringing, and singing, like an ice siren, alarm and allure. I jump, stomp, and kick down while walking onto this winter canvas. I’m holding a broom sideways — if I fall through, maybe it’ll save me. Should I be wearing a life jacket?

F1: Cities in Dust

Every December I make enormous weatherworks. The process is physically demanding — a duel, a sport, a dance — due to the difficult conditions (which are different every year). This art is always in cooperation with acquiescent to nature; i.e. this year, for the first time in ten, there is no ice. So “going-with-the-no-floe”, I shifted my colordrifts and glyphs to nearby snowy fields and frozen flora. But because the art is not at the time-honoured site, and I can only work at a much smaller size… all attempts are fails. (F1-F4):

F2: Color…Elide

Every December I make enormous weatherworks. The process is physically demanding — a duel, a sport, a dance — due to the difficult conditions (which are different every year). This art is always in cooperation with acquiescent to nature; i.e. this year, for the first time…

READ THE REST OF THE POST & SUBSCRIBE TO THE K.I.A. substack HERE

ne're attives (The Window by K.I.A. pt 17)

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The Doomsday Clock has now been moved to 90 seconds to midnight, and as a result many cities have begun holding exercises to train for emergencies like nuclear war. Above, a group of crisis actors practice for such an event. The run-through took place over 8 hours. They were paid minimum wage for the night. They had a lunch break at 2 a.m. Non-gluten meals were not an option. This photo was taken at 2:15 in the morning.

These men are having an argument. It started out as a discussion, but escalated. It didn't come to blows, but there was some pushing. They were talking about fashion, and whether the correct term to describe one man’s wardrobe (on the left, nearest to the wall) was half-shirt, crop top, or midriffer. No one had heard of, nor liked, the last term, which had been proffered by the man furthest on the right. Shoves ensued. At some point the neologist had to leave the sartorial melee by peeling out on his motorbike….

READ & SEE MORE PHOTOS FROM “THE WINDOW” — SUBSCRIBE AT K.I.A’s substack HERE: LINK

Themed sets of images from “The Window”:

The Window: a portrait in a thousand parts

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Below is a view of The Window art project installed as networked photographs, showing the connections across the images, subjects and themes (diversity, time, technology, velocity, beauty, movement, dance, Tarot, entanglement… etc).

“The Window”, institutional installation view of themes branching and massing from linear spine (proposed)

The Window is a 24/7/365/1 photo project capturing life in the 21st century city. (See more of the images and ideas-behind: HERE). Above is just one of its many infinite arrangements.

Much of the art by K.I.A. is one larger work composed of smaller elements, allowing iterative presentations. Here’s an installation whose content changes according to setting and arrangement; here’s a painting whose 30 individual paintings are to be decentralized; here’s a recombinant sculpture composed from many discrete parts, and here’s an intercombinant wall installation (this same approach later arrived at by El-Anatsui).

Battle (Ballet), from "The Window" by K.I.A.

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Sidewalk soloists to internal symphonies… duo pas seul

Two people months apart, spontaneously doing the same gestures and movements as they dance…

All images in The Window are candid happenstance; the 24/7/365/1 project is about interconnections across the images.

Possible Pareidolia

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TL; DR: A pairing of enigmatic images of couples from The Window project, third one at bottom.

Pairings, juxtapositions and patterns. Across the time span of The Window series (LINK), context emerges which generates (accretes?) considerations beyond each individual image.

Two photos taken months apart, at different times of day, of different situations, when juxtaposed within the context of an exhbition (virtual or institutional), suddenly obtain more layers of meaning.

For example in the project there is a photo of a woman in high heels and fur at 11 p.m., arms outstretched, smiling and posing for a photo as she leans back against a stretch limo. Months later I captured an image of a woman at 6 a.m crammed into a kid’s bike trailer, immobile (sleeping, sick, dead?), as her partner cycled from dumpster to dumpster looking for bottles.

Placed side by side, each image becomes a tuning fork that resonates to the other.

Another example: separate shots over months of 3 different groups of 3 women crossing the street together. Each group is ethnically homogenous and of the same age within their triplet, but when the photos are placed sequentially you notice that each group’s pattern of walking is significantly different — one group is close, almost shoulder to shoulder, arms and legs in synch; the next group somewhat matching in stride and arm movements, but a little farther apart from each other; and the last group of three is dispersed and with no physical cohesion of motion. Is it culture, age, season, setting, time of day, or happenstance that causes this phenomena?

One of the images by itself is just a word, but the three together are a poem.

The Window: Poetic Sets

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Themed groups of images from The Window: Velocity, Dance, Motion, Walking, Woman, Men, Trans, Night, Smokers, Selfies, Technology, Diversity, Equity, Beauty, History, Weddings, Dogs, Verticals, Time, U-Hauls…
Ediitoned signed archival prints: https://www.nu4ya.com/store?category=02+The+Window

The Window by K.I.A.: Every Photo a Film

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New section, or themed grouping, in the ginormous 24/7/365/1 photo project The Window by K.I.A.: Section 10 - Vignettes. These images hit at a bigger story happening beyond the borders of the photo — a shooting, a protest, a wedding, a riot, Drake, and Taylor Swift (ies)... (Many — most — of the images in the project are portraits showing the diversity, velocity, hilarity, vanity, complexity, eccentricity (etc) of the modern city in the 21st century. SEE VIGNETTES HERE. (Individual and compilation images available as signed editioned prints.)