A second attempt (PhD, 2014) at capturing the liminal space of the stairway – which ‘belongs to all and no one’ – is performed through another analogue optical device: the peephole camera. Mounted on the inside of the door of my apartment (third floor, left), it uses the only physical aperture between the private and the semi-public worlds. Triggered by the locomotion of people climbing the flight of stairs, the optical device produces a potentially infinite map seen from my subjective perspective – a map that itself exists within the very space that it represents and cumulates. The device becomes a probe of insight, an analytic apparatus from which to understand and reflect upon the world through forensic investigations of its photographic output. Obviously, such a map cannot be considered an average expression of all stairways of the city; the majority may share common denominators, while other aspects will be highly specific to each given situation. Precisely this circumstance – that immediately might seem problematic – is exactly its strength. It (subjectively) describes the city and its manifold variations as multidimensional and does not reduce the stairway to a diagrammatic, generic image (in the same way that Leconte reduces Paris to a tourist’s version). This ‘autobiographic’ or subjective map is one reality of many; a city is constituted by countless stairways, thereby suggesting a countless number of maps. As in Dorothea, thousands of camel-drivers carry internal maps, and behind the faces of the inhabitants encountered, an infinite number of maps exists, each with their own subjective reality. If all of those were to be exhaustively described in details through cartographic representations, a map at the scale of the world is needed, ‘which coincides point for point with it…’ c
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this page: The Peephole Camera
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