Rear Window

Rear Window turns Dutch photographer Jordi Huisman's camera on the backs of buildings across European capitals, the unplanned, patched-together architecture that faces courtyards and alleys rather than the street.

Where a building's front is designed and presented, its rear tends to accumulate balconies, satellite dishes, extensions, and repairs added piecemeal over decades by whoever lived there at the time; Huisman found that this informal accretion produced an oddly consistent visual language across cities that otherwise share little architectural history. The idea traces back to a bedroom window in The Hague, where Huisman studied photography at the KABK art academy: the chaotic view of houses across the courtyard, evidently built at different times and glued together over the years, stayed with him until, living in Amsterdam five years later, he began deliberately photographing the same phenomenon at friends' and acquaintances' homes. The Velvet Cell published the project in London in January 2014 as a saddle-stitched, 24-page softcover limited to 300 copies.

Huisman (b. 1982, Almere, the Netherlands) trained first in engineering before switching to photography at KABK, and has worked as a freelance photographer since 2005. Rear Window's voyeuristic vantage on the private, unshowcased side of urban buildings fits a broader interest, across his work, in what architecture and the built environment reveal when nobody is arranging it for a camera.