Diana Gordon’s World of Interiors

Getting Closer From Afar, Photographed by Mat + Kat

Text: Ana Cecilia Alvarez
Photography: Mat+Kat

When artist and critic John Berger produced and wrote Ways of Seeing in 1972, he was primarily concerned with the reproduction, through photography and video, of European oil paintings. In his BBC docuseries, reproductions of old DaVinci’s or Botticelli’s streamed one after the other, released from the fixed confines of their original gilded frames and private viewing rooms. “As you,” he addresses the viewer, “look at them now on your screen, your wallpaper is round them. Your window is opposite, your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colors, different sounds.”

Diana wears Supriya Lele skirt. Featured In Top Image: Alighieri earrings.

The photographs surrounding this text are framed, as it were, first by the layout of this webpage, and in a sense by these words. But they are further framed by the contours of your screen, the shape of your device, by the edges of your bed or your kitchen or couch, and if you look closer, by the smudges of your fingertips. “Every image,” Berger said, “embodies a way of seeing.” Especially now that embodiment—the porousness and tactility of being a body among others—feels more and more like a liability, images are often our only way of seeing those we love, or the world beyond our immediate six-foot radius. In the absence of touch, they are what you hold, often literally, swiped and pressed and cupped in your palms. Before, people used to travel to see images, carved into places of worship, hung on museum walls, projected onto movie screens. But now, in this period of extended isolation, it is the images that travel, proliferate, feed. Decontextualized, they take on the private contexts of our own surroundings, and are often our only visitors. “The images come to you,” Berger says. “You do not go to them.”

Here, photography duo Mat + Kat and their model, musician Diana Gordon, visit you from their home to yours.