window shopping #1 (Amsterdam)

I am far from the first to photograph shop windows. The camera captures what our brains, navigating the urban landscape, habitually filter out: the melding of the displays behind the glass with reflections from the street that produces beguiling and sometimes disturbingly surreal landscapes.

Eugène Atget’s “Boulevard de Strasbourg: Corsets” (1912) and “Magasin, avenue des Gobelins” (1925) are early examples of the genre:

Published in La Révolution Surréaliste in 1926 at the suggestion of his neighbor, Man Ray, Atget’s images of vanished Paris were understood not as the work of a competent professional or a self-conscious artist but as the spontaneous visions of an urban primitive—the Henri Rousseau of the camera. In Atget’s photographs of the deserted streets of old Paris and of shop windows haunted by elegant mannequins, the Surrealists recognized their own vision of the city as a “dream capital,” an urban labyrinth of memory and desire.
“Photography and Surrealism,” Metropolitan Museum and Art

The photographs below were all taken in Amsterdam in July 2003. Atget might not have appreciated the city’s unabashed eroticism, but we can be pretty sure Man Ray would have loved it.