Inner Sunset
San Francisco’s Sunset District lies on the Western seaboard of the city. The district was originally called the Outside Lands on account of its geographical location and detachment from the city, its topography determined by the protean rhythms of the Pacific Ocean.
For several years the Sunset was my home, living on the border between inner and outer sunset in a character-less apartment block next to the earthquake early warning siren, which fired its test signal every Tuesday at midday. This was the day I photographed the readymade view framed by apartment window.
The view was an introduction to a neighbourhood, city and country that was unfamiliar. The images that emerged reminded me of work by Alfred Hitchcock and Edwaerd Muybridge who had made the same journey and settled in the Bay Area almost a century before. Rear Window and the pioneering, locomotive studies of Muybridge’s are both a work of fragments and in one way or another. They narrate our elusive grip on reality by depicting time through the successive realization of multiple fragments.