This post has nothing to do with selling books (and isn’t likely to drive profit to my site).  The subject is just something I saw today and thought worth memorialising.  Not a fashion boutique window, this is/was a Chinese Restaurant, now closed due to ‘Refurbishment Thanks’ – as the faded sign declares.  I wish I could say I intended to gather so many reflections in the shot.  Then I could argue it’s after Eugene Atget – or something cute like that.  Atget, the French painter-turned-photographer, observed Paris as a project of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.  This included documenting the spectacle of shop windows and the -- human-simulacrum -- mannequins within.  I guess my shot is a reverse theme: the disintegration of the modern city (but that’s easy for me to say from the luxury of my virtual ivory tower).  Come to think of it, Atget was also revolutionary in trusting he could make an income from his modern hobby … so maybe I really am taking after him.

Closed Chinese Restaurant, 2007 / Eugene Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, 1927