What is a liminal space?

What does liminal space mean?

The phrase carries two meanings, and most confusion about it comes from mixing them up.

The first is the older one, from anthropology. A liminal space, or more precisely a liminal stage, is the middle of a rite of passage: the time when a person has left one status and has not yet entered the next. The second is the internet sense. Since about 2019, people have used the phrase for photographs and real places that feel oddly cut off from everyday life. Hotel corridors, empty malls, pools with no swimmers, school hallways in the evening.

The online sense is looser, and it has no official checklist. The places tend to share a few traits. They are familiar, so you know what they are for. They are usually empty at a moment when you would expect people. They may repeat, with identical doors, lamps or tiles running past the edge of what you can see. Or they seem to belong to an earlier era, one you half remember. The feeling can be eerie, calm or both at once.

Where do the words liminal and liminality come from?

It comes from the Latin limen, a threshold, the sill of a doorway. The modern meaning began with the French folklorist Arnold van Gennep, who published Les rites de passage in 1909. He surveyed the ceremonies societies use to move people from one condition to another, such as birth, coming of age and marriage, and noticed that they share a shape. The person is separated from the old position, spends a stretch in the middle belonging to neither, then is welcomed into the new one. The middle stage is the liminal one, and the condition of being in it is what anthropologists call liminality.

In the 1960s the British anthropologist Victor Turner made that middle stage the main subject. People in it, he wrote, are "betwixt and between" the positions that law, custom and ceremony assign. He called them threshold people. In 1974 he added a second word, liminoid, for in-between time that people enter by choice, at a festival or in front of a work of art. That word fits the internet better, but it never left academic writing.

You will also see liminal zone, usually meaning the in-between parts of a building or a city: corridors, stairwells, lobbies, platforms, car parks, the strip of ground at a border. They are places for passing through rather than staying, which is why so many liminal space photographs are taken in them.

In a ritual, the liminal one is a person, going through it with a group, under the eye of elders, with an end date. Online, it is a place, or the mood a picture of a place gives off. A ritual's middle stage is bearable partly because it ends. A photograph keeps you in the middle for as long as you look.

What does the dictionary say, and what is kenopsia?

Dictionary.com added liminal space in 2023 with an informal sense: any location that is unsettling, uncanny or dreamlike. Its example sentence is a classroom when school is out for the summer. That is a long way for a word to travel in a century.

A newer word may fit the feeling better. Kenopsia was invented by John Koenig for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, his project of made-up words for feelings that lacked names. He defines it as the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually full of people and is now quiet, like a school hallway in the evening or an unlit office on a weekend. It is not a clinical term, and you will not find it in a psychology textbook. It is a useful name for what many people are describing when they call a picture liminal.

Why do liminal spaces feel strange?

These places feel strange because they are ready, but nobody came. A ruin explains its own emptiness. The roof has fallen, the paint has peeled, and the story is obvious: people left. A ready room offers no such explanation. The lights are on, the chairs are set out, the floor is clean, and the people who were supposed to arrive have not. The place is complete, and the one thing missing is the reason it exists.

A few strands of research and design theory bear on this.

Behavior settings

In the late 1940s the psychologist Roger Barker began studying everyday life in a small Kansas town, and found that where children were predicted their behavior better than who they were. The same child acted like a student in class, a customer in a store, a spectator at a game. Barker called these units behavior settings, and a census of the town in the 1960s counted nearly 900. A setting is a place at a particular time with a standing pattern of activity, a pattern that belongs to the group rather than to any one person. A hardware store, in his terms, is a setting only during business hours. At midnight the building is still there and the setting is not. A liminal photograph often shows exactly that: the stage furniture in place and the performance missing.

Affordances and signifiers

The psychologist James Gibson argued that we perceive the world in terms of what it offers us, which he called affordances. A floor affords walking, a chair affords sitting. The designer Don Norman later argued that what people actually need is a signifier, the part you can perceive, such as a flat plate on a door that says push. A place can signal without being designed to. Norman's example is a train platform: people milling about means the train has not arrived, while an empty platform means you missed it.

For a commuter, an empty platform reads instantly, because the place has a rhythm and absence is part of it. A photograph separates the signal from the rhythm. You get the platform without the timetable, and nothing tells you whether the last train has just gone or the next one is a minute away.

Anchor objects

Psychologists who study scenes have shown that we carry a detailed, mostly unconscious grammar for familiar places. Melissa Võ and her colleagues call the big, fixed items that organize a room anchor objects. When people furnish a virtual kitchen, they place the fridge or the cooker first and arrange smaller things around it. Anchors tell you what part of a room you are in and what you are expected to do there. Rows of seats facing one way say lecture. Long sofas along a wall say wait.

Normally we are too busy using the room to notice any of this. Empty it, and the layout itself becomes the thing you see: seats facing a screen, tables waiting for diners, a roped-off line with no one in it. It is like a word that starts to look odd once you have stared at it too long.

Why do endless corridors feel unsettling?

A corridor has one job, which is to get you somewhere. A route is supposed to end at a place you can reach. Corridors start to feel odd when that end is hidden, when the scale is unclear, or when every stretch looks like every other.

Hotels are the clearest case, because their corridors are built to match. Most use a double-loaded layout, with rooms on both sides of one central passage, since it is cheap: one corridor serves two rows of rooms that earn money. The hotelier Ellsworth Statler helped make identical rooms standard by stacking them in a repeating pattern around shared plumbing. His hotels grew very long as a result. The cultural historian Roger Luckhurst, who wrote an entire book on the corridor, concluded that it has become an anxious and dystopian site.

Identical doors are efficient for the owner and hard on the guest. The urban planner Kevin Lynch called the ease of reading a place its legibility, and found that people struggled where the parts looked alike. Being lost and being uneasy are different things, but repetition may affect the second as well. Researchers in Cardiff who showed people computer-made rooms found that rooms with excessively repeated doors, windows or furniture were rated far more uncanny than normal versions. Those rooms were deliberately distorted, so the study does not prove that an ordinary hotel corridor has the same effect. It does suggest why repetition might matter once it begins to look excessive.

The same trick works outdoors. A foggy street at night, with a lit crossing sign and a line of lamps that fade out, removes the far end of the road. A long lens, a curve or a vanishing point too small to read can do it in a photograph. Real corridors almost always end. A picture can leave you wondering where you would arrive if you kept walking.

Why do lights left on and missing clocks feel odd?

Light is the clearest signal a building gives at a distance. We read a lit window as someone being home, a lit shop as open, a lit office at night as someone working late. Most of the time that reading is right, which is why light in an empty place can feel slightly off. A dark office at night is simply closed. A lit office with nobody at the desks sends a signal that nothing in the room confirms.

Hopper's Nighthawks (1942) shows a bright diner spilling light onto a dark street, and the Art Institute of Chicago notes that no entrance is visible. A theater's ghost light is different: one bulb left on an empty stage so the edge stays visible.

Time cues matter too. Malls, offices and big stores often use windowless interiors lit evenly by fluorescent tubes or LED panels, which removes the color of daylight, the angle of the sun and the dark coming on. That suits a building meant to work the same at any hour. It also removes some of the cues we use to place a scene in the day. In a photograph with no clock, no window and no one coming or going, you can tell what the room is for but not when you are in it. The spring 2020 lockdowns showed how little of our sense of time comes from clocks. Much of it comes from other people coming and going, and a photograph with no one in it leaves that cue out.

Why do places from childhood seem smaller?

Going back to a childhood classroom, a school hallway or a play area can upset your sense of scale. Some of that is you: the body measuring the room has grown. Experiments at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm used headsets and touch to make adults feel that a doll's body was their own, and objects then looked bigger and farther away. The effect was real but smaller than the change in body size would predict, so it is a hint rather than a full explanation.

Why do some people find them calm?

Many people look at pictures of liminal spaces because they feel peaceful. Comment threads under such images regularly include people who find them settling. This is not a mistake or a lack of sensitivity, and it is probably the most common reaction that explainers of the topic skip.

People differ in how much stimulation they want from a public place, and choice matters: in studies, people who sat alone for 15 minutes without a phone came out calmer, and time alone that people chose felt better than time forced on them. Someone scrolling through empty rooms can close the app. Someone stranded in a terminal at 3 a.m. cannot.

The calm reading starts from the same observation as the uneasy one: the place is set up for people, and they are not here. The difference is whether their absence feels like a loss or like room to breathe. A lit, quiet place where nothing is required of you can be a relief. Writers describe it in real rooms: a silent reading room in a city library, an empty church, an outdoor pool at dawn where, in one writer's words, she is utterly, blissfully unreachable.

How are they different from the Backrooms, dreamcore and weirdcore?

These are related and overlap in the same communities, but they are different things.

The Backrooms is a fictional world. It began on May 12, 2019, when a thread on 4chan asked for disquieting images, and one reply described an endless run of yellow rooms with old, damp carpet that a person could fall into by "noclipping" out of reality. The photograph that started it was an empty room with yellow wallpaper, beige carpet and fluorescent lights. Wikis and a short found-footage series by Kane Parsons later built it out into a setting with levels and rules. A liminal space is a kind of place or picture. The Backrooms is a story set in one imagined place. The full history is on the Backrooms page.

Dreamcore and weirdcore are neighboring aesthetics. Dreamcore draws on half-remembered childhood spaces, with a mood that slides from comforting to uneasy. Weirdcore leans toward collage and distorted images. Both often use altered or computer-made pictures, and neither needs a real place.

What are common examples?

The recurring list is short and familiar: hotel corridors, empty malls and food courts, indoor pools and drained pools, school hallways and classrooms, parking garages, airports and train platforms at odd hours, laundromats and gas stations at night, playgrounds in fog, and offices after closing. What they share is a combination of readiness and absence, a route with its end hidden, or an hour you cannot place, whatever the building type.

For a longer, picture-led tour with notes on what produces the feeling in each, see liminal space examples. If you would rather find places like these yourself, how to photograph liminal spaces covers the practical side.

A ruin explains its emptiness. A ready room does not.

The word stuck because it covers several related effects: a room missing its activity, a route missing its end, a scene missing its date, a resemblance to somewhere you once knew, and the way a photograph has been framed. When a picture feels liminal to you, ask which of these is doing the work. There is often more than one.

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