Across the street

For five years I have been walking around the streets of towns and villages in France and Europe, looking for shop windows that look like faces to me and tell human stories. Whenever I find one, I make a portrait of it, usually full-face and full-length, and add it to my collection, a modest Atget-like inventory of a form of popular culture. In the selection I am presenting here, although most of the shops have closed down, the stories I can hear from them are not stories of nostalgic regret but of individual achievement and of once keen modernity. There is no one around and yet human presences can strongly be felt, distinctive personalities, forceful desires and designs. Unexpectedly, in spite of their outdated appearances, there is an ephemeral beauty which lies at the meeting-point between past and present. Leaving a photographic trace of these windows across the street is a way of acknowledging their persistence in our contemporary world and making room for them in our collective imagination.