Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain

The book presents 170 images, mainly shop window displays, shot by artist David Hlynsky during the final years of the collapsing Soviet empire in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany and Moscow, using a Hasselblad camera to capture the slow, undramatic moments of daily life on the streets. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky’s own account of his time as a flâneur in the shopping plazas behind the Iron Curtain.

Table of Contents

Artist’s Statement (David Hlynsky) • Introduction: What Was it Like to Shop in these Streets? (David Hlynsky) • The Windows (photographs of c. 160 shop windows) • Stops Along the Way: David Hlynsky’s Communist (and Decommunizing) Shop Windows (essay by Martha Langford) • The Next Thing You Buy (essay by Jody Berland)