These 20 Photos Look Out Of This World, But I Took Them From My Apartment Window

Mourning Routine follows a period of recovery after my father’s death, where I replaced escapism with daily observation. From my apartment windows, changing skies become a ritual of remembrance, balancing control, release, and reflection.

Following three preceding bodies of work — White Knight, Gradient Loss, and Residual Noise — which traced the immediate aftermath of my father’s death through experimental image-making, shifting colour systems, and the breakdown of visual clarity, Mourning Routine marks a turning point in which grief moves from fragmentation towards structure.

Ultimately culminating in the desire to look after my own wellbeing I stopped smoking weed (a daily practice of mine since my teenage years). A former ritual of escapism I sought to regain control of my habits, arguably the highest form of release no longer relying on a substance as distraction. As the clouds parted in my mind I felt it necessary to start capturing the clouds in the sky. Keen to explore the full spectrum of colours again through this new lens I started setting my alarm for sunrise, excited to bear witness to what some may call his final resting place. Somewhat lazily I conducted the entirety of this chapter from the comfort of my lounge window as I sipped my morning coffee and paid homage to him. This eventually extended to any time of the day that the meteorological events outside caught my eye, experimenting with a variety of different techniques to exploit this small window to the soul.

I conducted this project alongside TRANSPARENT, and I think the fact that I spent so much time on my laptop removing my father from each image meant that I felt indebted to the art of photography. As previously I have never used any heavy post production and rejected it as a form of artistic expression...

I see similarities between this project and constrictive writing, much like Ernest Vincent Wright writing Gadsby without the letter 'E' - I constrained my creative abilities to the windows of my apartment.

It's interesting to dissect this tension between control and release in retrospect, allowing myself certain liberties like the use of colour once more, but then refraining from leaving the apartment just because I am using Photoshop and AI in the final chapter of the project.

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