Window Shopping

I took over 2,000 photos during my three-week vacation in Europe this summer--not so many that I hope I didn't miss the experience, and not so few that I hope I didn't miss recording at least one picture of each place we visited. It's easy to take a lot of pics when you're not paying for film and film development, and you have a phone in your pocket ready to do the job and quickly.

One thing I documented, occasionally, was interesting shop windows. I could have spent each day walking around the streets of Reykjavik, London, or Paris taking pics just of shop windows, but l didn't since I was usually walking on to something else. And I didn't want to see everything just through my phone screen.

When I got back to the U.S., it struck me how few storefronts have displays anymore--especially out in suburbia, where I live. The stores here are just brick and glass, with plastic signs to distinguish one from the next.

Even in D.C., there are few big store shop windows now that stores like Woodward and Lothrop are gone. The best places to spot creative shop windows are in the small and funky shops that have sprung up in the city.

Old W and L shop window from 1928

Probably the most creative shop window we saw was at Selfridge's in London. They had a whole series of windows dedicated to Shakespearean plays. Here is the window for Hamlet:

It's too bad I couldn't afford anything at Selfridge's--skirts were $800, etc.

Dressing shop windows used to be a potential job for creative (fictional) people, from Agnes, who worked her way up from shop girl to window dresser on Mr. Selfridge, to Rhoda Morgenstern on Mary Tyler Moore.

Probably I need to end this with some kind of statement/summary about the lack of beauty in our everyday lives in America, especially for those living away from the centers of culture. Or I just need to end this. Apparently, I could go on and on about shop windows, which is ironic since I don't like to shop (i.e., spending money on clothing) all that much.

Out here, instead of walking by artisan shops and beautifully decorated windows, I drive by stores that resemble rows of warehouses. Everything has been built the cheapest possible way, without any thought given to providing solace for the eyes and heart. This is America. The icky-sweet gelato in the freezer section of the supermarket tastes nothing like the gorgeous, creamy frozen ecstasy available on almost street corner in Italian towns.

And yet it's what we know, it's what we're used to, it's all we've come to expect. It's good to travel, to see such differences. The challenge becomes learning not to be bitter about the comparison and not to yearn for what we probably will never have.

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The top photo is a compilation of some of my shop window pics from this summer. Click on it to see it larger.

Somewhat feminist musings at the Musee d'Orsay

The Musee d'Orsay has been one of my favorite museums since I first saw it in 1991, on my first trip to Paris.

What's not to like about a museum that has entire sections/rooms devoted to Van Gogh, Monet, Manet and Degas? Housed in the former Gare d'Orsay train station, a Beaux-Arts structure completed in 1900, the building, with its massive, gold-embellished clocks and elegant arched glass ceiling, calls to mind the setting for The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Every trip I've taken to Paris since has included a delightful trip to the Musee. But visiting the Musee alongside a teenage girl this summer was a different experience. Sure, she liked its evocation of Hugo, the Impressionist rooms, the Degas sculptures. But after walking through multiple rooms, she asked, "Where are the women artists?"

Each room had been filled with paintings and sculptures of luscious women, prim women, naked women. But we had seen one lonely artwork by a woman--Mary Cassett, among the Impressionists.

After that, the rest of our afternoon tour became a bitter hunt for female artists. We rushed from artwork to artwork, examining the placards for any hint of a female name, but we never found another woman's art there.*

If you google "female artists at the Musee d'Orsay," the hits on the first page include the museum's own pages for The Modern Woman. Drawings by Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Other Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay and Splendour and Misery. Pictures of Prostitution, 1850-1910. In other words, women interpreted by men.

What were women doing while all these men had been sculpting, painting, creating? Tending to children? Devoting themselves to maintaining their own beauty? Posing for male artists? Or, perhaps, making art that would never be housed in the Musee d'Orsay.


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* I discovered after I returned home that the museum does house a few other female artists, including Berthe Morisot and Cecilia Beaux--but the number of artworks by women is pretty paltry compared to the hundreds by men. (I am counting 12 total among these three women). And to find them, I had to use Wikipedia and go through a list of major artists at the Musee. Otherwise, the Musee's website led me to paintings and art about women rather than by women.


All photographs by Beth Blevins. Copyright 2016.

The Seine seen from one of the clocks at the Musee d'Orsay.

Is it art or is it Prisma?

I took a lot of photos when I was in Italy recently. It's easy to take a good pic there because there is so much beauty. Even the handles on these garage doors in Lake Como looked like works of art:

When I got back, I wanted to linger over my photographs, perhaps to hang on to the experience a little longer. So I began to play around with Prisma.

Here's one of my original photos of a street in Lake Como:

And here it is after the Prisma treatment (the process only takes a minute or so, unless thousands of people are using it at once, and then it takes a few tries to get it to load):

I'm not sure what purpose Prisma actually serves, or if any of its results will be kept in the future. (Prisma bills itself as an art photo editor "for Instagram pics and selfies," which sounds pretty temporary.) Even if this is a short-lived fling, I've enjoyed seeing my photographs in new ways.

You can see all the Prisma-ized versions of my photos on my Google Photos page, Italian Buildings Given the Prisma Treatment (they also appear as a combined group in the top graphic on this page). To see the original photos I took, pre-Prisma, see: Italian Buildings, pre-Prisma.