Intermission

The theater curtains or the nested frames stretch this fleeting moment of a few hundredths of a second into a long, drawn-out film, allowing me to watch a new scene or imagine a new one each time. The first curtain, above the platform, prepares the stage for these cold, empty chairs. A scene perhaps from a social drama, a romance, or, if it were today, surely a comedy. The empty frame in the middle acts as a curtain or frame itself, through which the spectators in the chairs pass to see the background frame. These empty chairs, looking at this empty middle frame, seem to be staring at a blank, white curtain. But the photographer fills this emptiness of nested frames; from behind a window framed in black, they draw the curtain aside to reveal the main scene: the sky, the tree, the mountain, and the waiting chairs—ready to be the stage of a film in an outdoor cinema that showed no movie at all.