Thankfully i don’t have to write a long introduction for this one – they’re displays, and they speak for themselves. Set in working-class and slum neighborhoods, they are the displays of the bars, shops and homes. And it ain’t dressing, that’s Macy’s, and the like. These displays are direct lines of expression from the classes of folks who aren’t heard that much. These are the mom and pop shops, clubs, bars and homes of working and slum neighborhoods, but there doesn’t seem to be much selling, but mostly memorializing. If, even in shop windows, the displays go well beyond sales, what does it say, beyond what they’re trying to say specifically? Neighborhood life is the priority. Without that, there could be no sales. Neighborhood window displays declare or state things and it’s as simple as that – a proscenium for the, generally speaking, uneducated.
Here the windows are not for looking out, nor looking in, but at. The window frame is a proscenium, the sill or platform, a stage where things are placed from honor, homage or humor.
Windows, looking in, looking out, are a natural subject for a camera for obvious reasons, but even the first photograph, or more specifically, the earliest known surviving photograph made in a camera, used a window to point out of – the view from an upstairs window at Niépce’s estate, Le Gras, in the Burgundy region of France.
Window photography, a sub-genre of city depictions – in people’s minds, perhaps through Atget, is an urban thing, where owners and dwellers try to attract the eye and mind of the city’s unrelenting 24/7 foot traffic. And for the dwellers of each neighborhood, who see them in passing daily, the displays are markers, points of location – home.
People in neighborhoods don’t walk around all day thinking about that fact of their existence. They aren’t self-conscious or coy to begin with, but, aren’t stupid. Completely aware of their social place, in a cultural or sublimated ways and by building great tight-knit neighborhoods and living in them for generations, which has a value that neighborhood people see as greater than riches. We know our position in the world – rarely seen and never heard except on election day, or when someone has gotta dig out the WTC, be an essential worker, fight a foreign war or create a visual record of disappearing city neighborhoods and industry.
OK, we still gotta live, and we can express ourselves on the run, when and where we have the chance – at work, in shops, in social clubs, private homes, bars and restaurants where we live and work.
It seems the bottom half neighborhoods of all stripes and mixes favor their celebrities in sports, politics and religion, sometimes mixed. Definitely homages to the heroic are popular – veterans, the military, religion, country, and sports are often seen. The Blessed Virgin is the most popular woman displayed, although, many women are depicted in many ways. (highlighting, of course, the significance and abundance of the working-class catholic neighborhoods in cities and industry. There are few political statements, and many striking juxtapositions, like icons of religion and pop that reframe John Lennon’s famous observation between the two.
Botanicas are the most numerous, stage-worthy and theatrical of neighborhood displays, and thrive in Brooklyn and, particularly, the Bronx. They’ve disappeared over the years, but social clubs often sported nice displays. My old home of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, i would call one of the historic homes of the neighborhood club, where they certainly abounded. And both of those neighborhoods were also centers of window display art.
Patriotism, cherished actors who were replaced by generations of inferior ones, love of country, religious themes or the working-class version of art, from chintzy to classy, served freely on the sill stages for the muted edification of the local citizens of working neighborhoods.
It’s the single home or apartment dweller that can get into better and wilder ironic juxtapositions of humor and pure art, they’re not selling anything. Even commercial displays of the so-called mom and pop stores of these neighborhoods, are expressing, more than selling. They too, mix homage, humor and memorial into their displays, putting expression on a par with something meant to attract entry.
North Brooklyn – Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint, Chicago, Cleveland and many Rust belt towns is where i came across the most and some of the best, captured in my life of shooting and being in these neighborhoods, and sometimes visiting them over time and shooting their industry in operation, closure, abandonment, ruin, demolition and its aftermath.
Someone, generally muted to society, does have a desire to express, but locally.
The thing in itself, of course is no concept or imperative, but simply is. Ideas extracted from the experience of things are solids, it’s the place where ego dissolves, and things get plained down, especially by a camera, that can be operated to achieve objectivity, or, at least a consensus, because it’s inarguably real.
Like film stills or stages for soul, humor, compassion, patriotism, celebrity and comment set in working-class and slum neighborhoods with free access to see it. Normally windows are made to look out and let light in, these let ideas out and illuminate briefly the mind that set the window.
Neighborhood prosceniums collected since 1984, from many places, particularly New York, Chicago and Cleveland.
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