Sleeping Houses - Watchful Houses

This body of work is comprised of two "sister' series ; Sleeping Houses & Watchful Houses. When I relocated to Belgium from NYC I was curious as to why the Flemish villages and towns felt like there was no one there at night due to a cultural habit of closing the shutters on the houses every evening. To someone who hasn't grown up with this occurrence it was odd and very uninviting. My way of exploring this feeling of excludance was to go out into the evening and photography what I was seeing and the feeling of being in the middle of this environment. As I began to explore the areas around Belgium I notice that when crossing the border into the Netherlands that their cultural habit was exactly the opposite of their Dutch speaking neighbors - windows are left wide open, drapery is not shut and when you are on the street you can see into the houses. This gives the villages and town a glow which can be interpreted as a sort of cultural hospitality - beacons in the night. These two series where created to stand on their own, which when viewed in a room communicates the feeling of standing on the street in the environment. By mixing the two series together it creates a dialogue between the closed and openness - heightening the sense of difference between these two cultures (countries) that share a spoken language and live side by side on the map.