NZ Visual Diary - entry 388

store front window - High Street

Renaissance painters challenged the perceptual limitations imposed by a two-dimensional canvas. Painters who embraced Cubism equally challenged the convention of a fixed point of view.

Like many other photographers, I use store-front windows to overcome in creative, and sometimes provocative, ways the limitations of a camera’s field of view, as today’s entry attempts to demonstrate.

First there is the natural reflective properties of the store-front window, seen here in the right-of-centre reflection of a building on the opposite side of the street, a playful nod to contemporary architecture’s focus on fluidity between inside/outside building spaces.

Secondly, the store’s staff have installed mirrors on various portions of the upper window plane, thereby creating other visual illusions - of two women chatting across the street in Freyberg Square as seen in the left-side mirror panel or, in the upper-right portion of the store window, the refracted echo of the store’s upper-floor exterior and cornice.

Finally, as depicted in the lower-right portion of the store window, we see the use of photography to isolate and distill moments in time, in this instance the temporal sequencing of a shoplifter’s nefarious deed chronicled as a warning that we are being watched . . . and perhaps by implication pursued.

And, so it is with street photographers: we watch, we pursue, we capture.