Patrick Pound collects photographs as if on a dare. For thirty years, the New Zealand-born, Australian artist has been collecting other people’s photographs and placing them in his own peculiar categories. To photograph the world is to collect it in the form of images. Pound’s work seems to propose: ‘If only we could find all the pieces, we might solve the puzzle.’ It is a folly, of course.

In Windows, Pound’s first photobook with Perimeter Editions, we find a cross-section of images lifted from a single category in Pound’s vast collection of 70,000 photographs. Each of the ‘found’ photographs in this new book features a window seen from the outside. We are allowed to look through them, from the privacy of our own homes. We see ghostly figures and happy families; we see actors acting, and everyday folks acting up; we see real and imagined worlds. Every scene is one of a kind. Page after page, we look through other people’s photographs and other people’s windows. Here, Pound reminds us that the photograph is a window posing as a mirror. Surprisingly, through its single constraint, Windows offers a little history of photography – its evolving material qualities and its practical and expressive uses.

Pound finds almost all of his photographs – discarded amateur snaps and photographic prints from now-defunct picture libraries, newspaper and cinema archives – for sale on eBay and other online platforms. He calls the internet a vast, unhinged album, and for years he has spent countless hours sorting through the morass, finding or inventing connections. The recently redundant images that feature in this book extend beyond the nostalgic or sentimental; they speak to us directly about our present. Photographs that have been taken from their context, and which have lost their initial reason for ‘living’, are remarkably pliable little signs.

In 2023, these photographs – and this book – remind us of anything from the nuances of human interconnection to the separation of domestic dwellings, with the offering of sanctuary and entrapment nestled together. These images have lost their utility, only to find another more important one. Just when we thought they were past their use-by date, we are pressed to think again.

Windows is a book of photographs worth looking through. It is a sampler of life as it is, was, and might be lived.