Voyeur/Viewer

Bergdorf Goodman, Fifth Avenue windows, ph Alfred Eisenstaedt 1942There is something about views through windows that fascinate me. Looking out, and looking in. Once I saw an exhibition by an artist who had painted views from the windows of all the hotels she’d stayed in around the world. How wonderful, I thought. Perhaps looking into someone’s window is voyeuristic, like peeping into their soul, but looking out … that is like looking out onto the soul of the world as it passes before you.

I also love black and white street photography of the early twentieth century. It is rather different from our own blogosphere that is flooded with images from around the world of people preening like peacocks in their fine and borrowed designer feathers. The people in these decades-old photographs aren’t posing, they are often quite ordinary and the picture rather reveals the photographer’s eye – the photographer’s soul.

Bergdorf Goodman, Fifth Avenue windows, ph Alfred Eisenstaedt 1942Shop windows are a completely different kettle of fish however: these are designed to be looked into. One can peer through the glass quite legitimately. Even more fascinating is this glimpse onto 1940s 5th Avenue past the mannequins’ legs and through the shop windows. Now the position is reversed: the ladies looking in are in turn being looked upon. It’s quite poetic.

The fashions of the 1920s and 1940s neatly date these images, yet they are alternately serene, timeless in their stillness and full of life with all the bustle of the street outside. They whisk me away to another world.

Saks, Fifth Avenue windows, ph Alfred Eisenstaedt 1942Midtown, Fifth Avenue windows, ph Alfred Eisenstaedt 1942Lingerie in a Parisian window, 1920s1920s winter coatsMarshall Fields window, 1920s‘Travel Smartly in Tweed’ window display for Franklin Simon, 1929