Picture Window

Picture Window was made in collaboration with Getty's British archives by selecting plates from thousands of previously unused pictures, spanning over a century of the archive’s Welsh, Scottish, and English collections. The original archival photographs serve as background plates for Guinevere Van Seenus to newly inhabit, and illustrate how little fashion has changed over time. 

The series realizes a continuity between both classic and contemporary gestures and wardrobe, expressing a broader continuity unique to the photographic medium that runs counter to the usual conception of photography as a truthful record. Fundamentally appropriative of all it captures and incorporates, photography draws no distinction between what it makes and what it borrows, or between its past and present subjects. It lends its reality equally to all—and in placing such equally realized subjects side-by-side, it is capable of creating a coexistence that is neither true nor false, but simply photographic in nature.

Drawing on past and present alike for their materials, these photographs reduce their subjects to surreal aesthetic entities. Alongside the strangely living images of the past, Van Seenus becomes equally ghostly, her humanity—and theirs—transcended by a purely photographic existence.

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A man sitting on the Mersey Ferry with the Liver Building in the background, 1954
S.S. La Marguerite and Edgar Tarry Adams Boat Spitfire, 1898
Journalist Katharine Whitehorn arrives at Waterloo Railway Station, London, 1956
An enormous storm in London. Two pedestrians battling against the wind, 1935
British cabinet held a special meeting on the 12th of March to discuss the "Austrian Question", 1938
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan with his wife Dorothy, Birch Grove House, 1955
Members of the London Sun Bathing Society enjoying the summer, 1920
Two Mannequins wearing the latest Autumn Fashion, 1935
Painters at the bank of Lake Buttermere, 1938
A Newcastle street scene, 1950
London girls at their matutinal running training, 1937
Enterprising young Beauty Specialist is trimming a customers hair in the London suburbs, 1930
Maids at Church House, Charwelton, Northhamptonshire, 1903
Tyroleans from Kitsbuehel, dancing at the May Fair Hotel, London, 2017
Female students of the East Anglian Institute of Agriculture in Essex on a modern chariot, 1937
A group of teenage girls enjoying themselves in the English countryside, 1957
Mr. G. Hearn, a lodge keeper at Windsor Castle, pours a glass of his own rose wine, 1936

Picture Window was made in collaboration with Getty's British archives. After sorting through thousands of previously unseen pictures, spanning over a century of the archive’s Welsh, Scottish, and English collections, Heck photographed and inserted Guinevere Van Seenus into the plates in order to illustrate the similarities between fashion over the past century.

Archive, 2007–26