Reiner Leist studied Visual Arts and Photography at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich; the University of Cape Town; and the School of Visual Arts. Leist has exhibited widely, including one-person exhibitions in Berlin, Munich, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. Since 2003, he has taught at Hunter College.

“In hindsight, Window for me has become a metaphor for the paradoxical relationship between intent and actuality in life. This routine study of my view, once begun, turned into a habit not unlike brushing my teeth. I expected to tire of its repetitiveness, but also suspected I might find in this tiny ritual a more extraordinary act, a life-defining gesture.”

- Reiner Leist

Since 1995, Leist has used a 19th-century full-plate camera to photograph the view from his 26th-floor apartment on Eighth Avenue overlooking downtown Manhattan. The entire Window project now comprises approximately 3,000 exposures capturing changes both infinitesimal and momentous in a slice of Manhattan that includes One Penn Plaza, Madison Square Garden, the New Yorker Hotel, and, until September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center. Leist prints blank negatives to represent the days he is absent from his apartment, and the resulting void foreshadows the emptiness that marks the center of his views (post 9/11) in the space where the towers once stood.

Photographically, Window perhaps represents what Roland Barthes referred to as the “madness” of photography: that which remains irreducible and unknowable except on an intensely personal and private level. Leist's project reminds us that no matter how much the city changes, we manage to make it our own, every day.