Rooms Without Walls

For one winter I photographed balconies in three cities. I did not photograph the buildings, only the small outdoor rooms stuck to them, and only from the street, the way a neighbour would see them on the way to the bakery.

A balcony is the one part of a rented flat that a tenant is allowed to arrange in public. Inside, the walls belong to the landlord and the furniture often belongs to the tenant before. Outside, on a ledge a metre deep, people decide everything themselves. A folding chair. A tomato plant in a paint tin. A bicycle that will never fit through the door again. Laundry hung in order of size.

I started the series after moving into a flat with no balcony and realising how much I missed having somewhere to stand that was neither inside nor out. From the street I began to notice how carefully other people used theirs. Some were storage, some were gardens, and some were clearly the only place in the flat where a person could smoke, or argue, or telephone a relative without being overheard.

The photographs were made on a medium-format camera with slow film, mostly in the hour after lunch, when the light in all three cities goes the colour of weak tea. I never asked to go up and I never photographed a face. When someone came out, I waited for them to go back in, and sometimes that took a long time, which taught me more about the balcony than any frame did.

By the end of the winter I noticed that none of these rooms had walls and yet all of them were private. People had built privacy out of a bedsheet, a row of pots, the angle of a chair. It is a kind of architecture that nobody designs and everybody practises, and it disappears the day the tenant moves out.