Issue 20: Nigel Baldacchino on Veils, Windows, and Fragments

In this issue, I sat down with Maltese artist and photographer Nigel Baldacchino to explore the delicate line between perception and introspection. Our conversation moved through veils and windows, pine groves and seas, fragments and arrows—each a metaphor for how photography can shape the way we look at the world, and how the world reflects back our own inner landscapes.

Veils and Flatness
One theme recurred again and again: the fragile balance between depth and flatness in perception. In his series Fog, he often places nets or screens between the camera and the world. These veils create different kinds of blur—objects in focus but obscured, or out of focus but signaling depth. For Nigel, this is more than a visual trick: it echoes the anxious state of mind where perspective collapses, everything appears on the same plane, and the world loses hierarchy. His “fog” is psychological, a metaphor for how we sometimes see when overwhelmed.

Clear Windows
In Clear Windows, Nigel turns to glass. We assume windows are neutral conduits of vision, but he reminds us that glass has its own body and politics. Transparency depends on light: when inside is brighter than outside, a window becomes a mirror, and vice versa. He describes windows as “valves of equity,” a tongue-in-cheek phrase pointing to how architecture reflects social divides. Expensive glass is almost invisible, while cheaper panes reflect and distort. Yet his photographs are not didactic demonstrations—they remain contemplations on clarity itself, on the paradox of something designed to disappear that insists on being seen.

Pinetu
In Pinetu he photographs a grid of pine trees planted by the British rulers, arguably to discourage social gatherings and to enforce control. Over time, the grove became a paradoxical site of gathering, layered with new social meanings. Nigel approached it with a 500mm lens, and that choice is central to the work. The lens compresses space and flattens perspective, a visual language associated with surveillance and watching from a distance. For him, this way of seeing is inseparable from the project: Pinetu is less about documenting a park than about inhabiting a mode of observation, where the act of looking itself—covert, compressed, and tense—becomes the true subject of the photographs.

The Sea
Perhaps his most personal work, The Sea gathers images that resist easy definition but share a particular resonance. He describes them as ambivalent—cold and warm, near and far, intimate and distant at once. A poem accompanies the series, in which the sea embodies this refusal of singular meaning. At the heart of the project lies the symbol of an arrow embedded in a wall, its shadow doubled by artificial light. For Nigel, the arrow represents precision: photography as a narrow aim, even when the images themselves feel fragmentary. He speaks of recurring motifs as “oranges”—elements that surface across many photographs, sometimes unconsciously, and later define the spine of a series. Through editing, these fragments coalesce, and the tacit knowledge of seeing takes shape before it can be named.

Fragments and Space
Nigel’s work is always fragmentary, and he embraces this. Rather than seeking a complete picture, he trusts the fragment to feel real and honest. This carries into his thinking about exhibition design. A photograph framed on a wall is not a neutral gesture but a design decision, as deliberate as sculptural display. In galleries or outdoors, the question is always whether the space amplifies the spirit of the work or works against it. For him, presentation is not decoration but part of the artwork itself.

Across his projects, Nigel insists that photography is less about what is seen than about how we look. Veils, windows, long lenses, fragments—they all become ways of tuning perception, of translating tacit inner states into visible form. His images invite us into that suspended interval between clarity and opacity, where the world and our own inner landscapes mirror one another.