Windows to the Outside World

1. A child leans against a glass pane in the North America wing of the Natural History Museum. This diorama is set in the mid-1800s before the ‘great slaughter’ reduced bison populations from 60-70 million to just a few thousand in the 1880s.

2. A billboard overlooking a wall of printed greenery in NoHo.

3. Plant boxes sit in front of a plastic leaf wall on East 4th Street.

4. In The Flower District, Ting packages trees for transport within a store that sells exclusively artificial plants. This specific tree takes about five days to create and is sold for around $3000.

5. A plant wall in the Lower East Side. Most American houseplants originate from tropical or subtropical climates and have adapted to indoor conditions.

Wandering through Manhattan, I observe a world where nature is increasingly viewed and appreciated from a distance—framed behind windows, mediated through screens, confined to parks and planters, or simulated altogether. What was once a source of direct, multi-sensory experience has, for many, become a curated aesthetic or commodity, packaged for consumption rather than lived and engaged with. Within this observation, there is not just a physical separation from nature but a psychological and cultural one—an extinction of experience unfolding quietly around us.

The scenic model of nature—pristine, controlled, and picturesque—dominates our visual media, but exists largely apart from daily city life. Rhythms of growth and decay, the untamed and unpredictable aspects of the natural world, and even species native to our area are largely absent from urban indoor existence. In their place, we encounter nature as an object of control, an abstraction, or a fleeting spectacle glimpsed between obligations.

And yet, we are never truly separated from the natural world; nature exists all around us  in overlooked and unexpected ways—embedded in the structures we build, the air we breathe, and the biological rhythms that guide our lives. The concept of our disconnection is, in many ways, an illusion shaped by cultural narratives and norms rather than an inherent reality.

Through these images, I seek to capture the quiet tension between this presence and absence, inviting a reconsideration of what it means to be connected with the natural world.