Pictured Windows

Pictured Windows is a group exhibition that explores the duality of window pictures and the contrast between what is presented and what is reflected. It begins with Eugène Atget‘s Paris storefronts of the early twentieth century and brings together photographers who have explored the reflective ambiguity and cultural significance of the storefront as a changing still life. Atget along with Berenice Abbott and Fred Herzog explore ways in which the objects and design of window displays reflect a cultural moment; through these window pictures, they take inventory of their cities. Phil Bergerson humorously presents displayed objects as glass-cased relics of a deserted past, while the works of Lee Friedlander, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Abelardo Morell investigate the surrealist possibilities of reflective surfaces. All the works in the exhibition feature the shop window as vitrine, framing its seemingly banal contents, and the photographs, as Susan Sontag writes, “[bring] to our attention the coexistence of sewing machine and umbrella, that chance meeting, which a great Surrealist poet has praised as the essence of beauty.”