One of the subjects most likely to express a sense of surreal estrangement, producing absurd and destabilising photographic images, is the display of goods in shops and warehouses.
Strolling through the city, it is not unusual to find shop windows where the need to catch the eye by surprising is combined with substantial bad taste.
Exhibitions where the evident artificiality of faceless mannequins is best expressed in the grotesque poses of a macabre ballet: then you may meet those who observe in amazement, complicity or indifference, or look as if what they see were a distorted, but also true, reflection of themselves.
Or one may stumble upon places where the reiteration, the multiplication of already questionable objects accentuates the incongruent aspect of each of them.
It seems to me that, in presenting these images, we are seeing a drift away from common sense and good taste that clearly shows the spirit of the times, which combines commercial needs with a falsely playful and winking attitude, and a lot of rubbish.
“The sleep of reason generates monsters”, to quote the title given by a great master to one of his famous cycles of works.
The photographer’s gaze, as he walks through the streets of the city, must be careful to capture these images, to overturn their spirit in order to draw out all their load of nonsense: in the images I present here, I have tried to extract the monstrum from banal exhibitions of commercial articles, joking about it a little.
