The homogenisation of cities around the world means that wherever you go, you find the same fast food restaurants, clothes shops and big names. I was reading about Sao Paulo where the city officials  banned commercial businesses from advertising on the street. It was part of a ‘Clean City Law’ pioneered by the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.

“”The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution . . . pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”

This has meant that billboards, outdoor video screens and the allowable size of shop signage have been drastically reduced. I think the idea of ‘visual pollution’ is an interesting one, and in many ways I can see the sense of this. It is the richest companies that litter our public space with their messages – but the smaller businesses could also lose out as a result of the law. It may be that the consumer will not know about the business in order to access it.

In Tokyo much of the signage is in Japanese, and not necessarily Western Friendly (no bad thing perhaps – and of course combating the homogenisation discussed earlier) but what this means is that the tourist misses out on many wonderful eateries and hostelries – many of which are not ground floor based – so you cannot look in to the shopfront to see what is within. This and perhaps the way our city centres are becoming more and more the same is what moved me to start this project – celebrating the shop window. In particular I enjoy the small, one-off business, where the individual identity of the window perhaps reflects the owner’s particular taste and sensibility.

This started in Prague in 2008. Previous to this I had been photographing individual buildings- putting together all of the buildings on the street. I was interested in the entirety of the ‘high street’ and the individuality of buildings in relation to an art spaces location on the street (see above – Broad Street in Stoke-on-Trent) – but then became fascinated by the individual windows. They are stage sets; communicating a narrative to the public. The first one which I became infatuated with was the window of the Bila Labut department store in Prague, (above – taken Feb. 2008) which was just around the corner from a hotel I was staying in. I took a few images of the windows at night – but without my tripod I could not achieve exactly what I wanted.

I returned to Prague at the beginning of the month (March 2010) – this time with a tripod, and my camera and wide angle lens, determined to collect some of the fantastic Talking Windows there. This project will continue, as I am determined to document the wonderful, unique windows in City Centres – before they die out.

I have found that they look more dramatic when lit up at night, but this too is something that is disappearing, as environmentalists push for light use in cities at night to be reduced, in order to lessen the carbon footprints – something which ethically I agree with, but what a loss visually!

*****

TALKING CITY is Anna Francis’ Longhouse Guest Editor project, for March 2010.

Click here to go to the project page.