About

A decade ago I lead a group of students at the Sivuyiseni Primary School through a cultural autobiography bookmaking project. The students illustrated their daily lives and their immediate environment in simple accordion books donated by the good folks at Soho Letterpress. Blank pages were brought to life with colorful drawings of family members, birthday celebrations and details of home life, in and outside of their dwellings. 

Fast forward to today, some 10 years on, and a version of this project is still in existence, albeit pared down. It has morphed into a singular prompt from the original project - capture the view outside your window. I teach this lesson every year to encourage my students to look closely at their surroundings and take in the multilayered complexity of their environment, from the natural world to human engagement. Surveying each others work, students find points of commonality and curiosity in equal measure.  

As we sit, confined to our homes in an effort to flatten the COVID-19 curve, I am struck by the opportunity we have to share our environment with one another. Have a look out your window. What do you see? What can you share? Capture that image in whatever visual medium strikes your fancy and send it my way to upload to this site and the corresponding Instagram account. What may seem mundane, and frankly boring, to our tired eyes, may be beautiful or fascinating to someone else. Above all, looking at the view through someone else’s window, is seeing their world through their eyes, one little section at a time.