Through Civic Views, Emilio Martínez-Poppe photographs the views from government workers’ office windows, transforming ordinary perspectives into a meditation on public institutions, civic labor, and the people who make government function.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Emilio Martínez-Poppe presents Civic Views, a project that quietly reframes how we think about government, labor, and perspective.
Born in Baltimore and based in New York, Martínez-Poppe developed the project by visiting more than 20 government agencies in Philadelphia.
There, the artist interviewed employees and photographed the views visible from their office windows.
Rather than focusing on government buildings as symbols of institutional power, Civic Views turns its attention toward something more personal: what the people working inside those institutions actually see.
Looking Through the Windows of Government
The window becomes a central device in Martínez-Poppe’s project.
Each photograph represents a view encountered by someone working within a government agency.
These are not monumental images of political authority. They are everyday perspectives—views encountered repeatedly by people carrying out the daily work of civic institutions.
By photographing these windows, Martínez-Poppe shifts attention from government as an abstract system toward the individuals who operate within it.
The institution becomes connected to a human point of view.
Recreating the Original Perspective
The physical presentation of Civic Views is essential to the project.
Martínez-Poppe reproduces the photographs at a one-to-one scale and installs them at the same height as the original windows.
This allows visitors to encounter each image from a perspective resembling that of the government employee whose workplace was photographed.
Instead of simply looking at a photograph of a window, viewers are invited to imaginatively occupy another person’s position.
The gallery becomes a space where one perspective is temporarily exchanged for another.
Government, Labor, and the People Inside Institutions
This shift in perspective introduces a larger question about civic life.
Government is often understood through policies, laws, agencies, elections, and political structures. But institutions are also workplaces filled with people performing everyday tasks.
Civic Views brings those individuals back into the picture.
By interviewing government employees and documenting the environments from which they work, Martínez-Poppe draws attention to the human labor embedded within public institutions.
The project suggests that understanding government also requires understanding the people who inhabit and maintain its systems.
Photography, Philadelphia, and 1839
The project also connects contemporary civic life to the early history of photography in the United States.
Martínez-Poppe draws inspiration from one of the earliest surviving photographs in the country, taken in 1839 from a window at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.
That historical connection gives the act of looking through a government window another dimension.
Nearly two centuries separate the historical photograph from Martínez-Poppe’s contemporary images, yet both use a window as a point from which the world outside can be observed.
The project therefore connects the history of photography with the history of civic institutions and the changing urban landscape of Philadelphia.
The Window as a Frame
A window naturally creates a frame.
It determines what can be seen while excluding everything outside its boundaries.
Photography operates in a similar way.
By bringing these two forms of framing together, Martínez-Poppe asks viewers to think about perspective itself: where someone stands, what they can see from that position, and how their location shapes their understanding of the world.
In Civic Views, perspective is therefore both physical and conceptual.
Each image belongs to a particular place, but it also represents a particular position within a larger civic system.
Civic Views at the Whitney Biennial 2026
Presented within the Whitney Museum of American Art, these seemingly ordinary views take on new significance.
The photographs invite visitors to consider institutions from the inside rather than only encountering them through their public-facing identities.
Government becomes not simply a system of policies and authority, but a network of workplaces, individuals, routines, and perspectives.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Emilio Martínez-Poppe’s Civic Views transforms the simple act of looking through a window into a reflection on civic life—reminding us that institutions are shaped not only by policies and structures, but by the people and perspectives within them.
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