window shopping #2 (Italy)

The mainstream of photographic activity has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive – the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be.
Susan Sontag, On Photography

All photographs taken in January–March 2001, while I was teaching at the University of Alberta school in Cortona, Italy.