Birds through my window: photography as liminal looking

This chapter explores how John Darwell’s Birds Through My Window is a fundamentally philosophical body of photographic work that explores liminality. The work depicts garden birds photographed through the condensation of a kitchen window. As the birds are obscured by the moisture, their presence and the garden space are more suggested than clearly envisaged, and the images thus poetically allude to liminality on several levels. The garden is seen as a liminal space constituting a threshold between nature and culture; the birds traversing this space and inhabiting the aerial realm are metaphors for liminality. Most importantly, however, the window, itself a boundary between inside and outside, is depicted as defunct by denying us clear sight. This complex view invites the viewer to contemplate a different manner of looking, more of a glancing out of the corner of our eyes that arguably is in itself, liminal looking.