Dirty Windows
MERRY ALPERN
MERRY ALPERN, 1993–1994
When Merry Alpern found out her friend’s bathroom window looked out onto the bathroom window of an illegal brothel, she set up camp. Hitchcock’s Rear Window had come true, and she spent a year taking grainy photos of illicit scenes. Painfully aware of the immorality of her voyeurism, the glimpses of a hidden world she saw kept bringing her back. The framing of the images was necessitated by the chance positioning of the window, but you couldn’t have asked for a better position. A narrative is told in minutiae – we glimpse a life we do not live and tell a story to ourselves.