Posts tagged ‘Mannequins’
Blank face bunny
This is what happens to people who spend too much time and money in shopping malls.
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As I wrote yesterday, I have to make a series of prints for a shared project; my contribution will be a dozen or so of the Store Life images. This is the one I chose to start with; color matching the large expanse of off white is a royal pain.
Strip Mall Amazon - Arboretum, Austin 2008
A bare breasted Amazon, with a bad headache, front and center in a north Austin strip mall store window. An inebriated Spring Break reveler selling clothes.
Perhaps this is the real reason that the strip mall operators didn’t want me to take pictures on Sunday morning? See the previous post for a discussion of that incident.
I could hardly believe it when I saw this display in a national chain store window. Was it really a deliberate choice or an accident? Are topless celebrities so normal that we expect the general public to adopt this as the fall fashion?
This is the latest addition to the Store Life series; you can see more in the Store Life Revisited selection of the parent Web site.
See No Evil
Reflected in the impossibly slim forms of the near naked mannequins are two less narrow women. The women cover their faces, determined to see no evil; avoiding the accusation offered by the dummies and the giant photograph of an anorexic girl that shares their window.
Would the real women cut of their heads and arms to look like the mannequins? No, but they might consider it. Rubens and Renoir celebrated a different standard in their paintings; who offers such alternative valuations today?
Store windows have been a long running theme in my photography; you can see more in the Store Life Revisited selection of my main Web site.
Female mannequin, New Orleans, 1990
The sadness of this mannequin’s resigned expression, her beauty, her baldness, and especialy her mutilation, all ask larger and more disturbing questions than whether I like the clothes she is displaying. A young women with a shaved head suggests cancer and concentration camps; the slice through her right eye, parallel with her elegant collar, speaks of abuse, misogyny and rape in the heart our ‘civilized’ society.
And that’s just one photograph of one store. Sometimes beautiful, often sensual or erotic, occasionally sinister and disturbing, always, always surreal: store windows offer a chorus of mixed messages waiting to be noticed. These windows are frozen one scene plays, unconsciously assembled in small theatres by store managers and window dressers. They are commentaries on us, on our society and culture. They are mirrors, literally and metaphorically, for looking at ourselves and who we are.
Store windows have been a long running theme in my photography (you never have to travel far to find one); you can see more in the Store Life Revisited selection of my main Web site.
