Curtains

Windows on the Unreality We Live In

Curtains is a dizzying photographic foray into the hidden realities lurking in the folds of puddled curtains that the photographer, John Briggs, found in windows of a central London office building. The photographer puts the curtain folds though simple transformations that result in strange creatures and eerie landscapes that suggest to him that everyday reality might be unreal.

World-renowned black and white photographer Paul Caponigro has called the 32 pages of the curtain series “innuendos for the eye.” Eric Lewis, composer and violinist of Manhattan String Quartet and Prometheus fame calls them “alluring mysteries of abstract, like sensuous musical shapes formed in the mind and filled with undefinable feelings.”

The photographer himself wonders playfully (but perhaps seriously) if the folds of these curtains “are examples of what’s hidden in plain sight all around us, alternative versions of the marvelous unreality we live in.”

The book includes an introduction in which Briggs, who has a Ph.D. in aesthetics, also discusses the nature of abstract art.