“A photograph can be a window, or it can be a mirror.” 

—John Szarkowski, curator of Windows and Mirrors, MoMA 

This exhibition begins with that duality: photography as a way of seeing outward, onto the world, or inward,  toward the self. The photograph, at once transparent and opaque, refuses to be only one thing. 

From the history of modern art, the window has often been a metaphor for looking. Painters like Louis Dodd carried forward the tradition of framing vision through panes of glass, while contemporary photographers such as Takashi Homma have revisited the motif with subtlety, using the window as both subject and device. Pho tography, situated within this lineage, becomes not only a tool of representation but a commentary on percep tion itself. 

Yet photography has always been twofold: there is the instant of capturing the image, and then there is its afterlife. How it is shared, circulated, and encountered. Like music, where a song exists as a recording, a stream, or a live performance, photography too has its multiple forms: the photobook, the print, the exhibition. The gallery setting opens up further possibilities: scale, materiality, texture, and light. It allows the photographic object to be experienced as both image and thing.  

In this sense, photography enters into dialogue with architecture. Both are modes of framing, structuring, and situating experience. An exhibition, like a building, is a constructed environment one that shapes how we see and move. Context, material, and space provide limits, but also opportunities for experimentation. 

Photography also intersects with other disciplines, including design, and sculpture, as well as urgent conversations about the environment. Every act of photographing is a way of framing the world and making sense of the everyday. Galleries and museums, in turn, take on the responsibility of reframing. Placing the photographic object in dialogue with history, with current events, with each other.  

Recent discussions in Aperture’s Design Issue (2024), particularly Dayanita Singh’s reflections on the “pho tographic object,” remind us that the photograph is never fixed. Singh pushes us to think of photographs not only as flat images, but as books, boxes, and architectures. She discusses how photographs are objects that can be unfolded, rearranged, carried, and reactivated. This resonates deeply with the ethos of Ysasi Gallery. 

Ysasi Gallery was founded as a place to gather, to ask questions, and to experiment with the traditional gallery model. With each exhibition, we seek to extend that process, inviting artists to respond to the space as much as to one another. 

For this group show, we invited five photographers to interpret the prompt in their own way. The result is not a single answer, but a constellation of responses: UV-printed photographs on tiles and wood, an architectural structure of washi paper, handmade frames, a handwoven towel, and more.  

In a moment where images overwhelm us on our phones and our feeds, it is rare even for photographers to encounter their work as physical prints. Here, we return to the photograph as an object, insisting on its tactile and spatial presence.