Cuba's Sparse and Poetic Storefront Windows

[El Presidente]

I noticed in December how much work was going into the window storefronts. There was bugger all in them but someone wa at least "trying". 

This brief article alertedme to the fact that Window-dressers employed by Cuba’s bureau of advertising work to transform actual scarcity into imaginative displays.

 

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbz4qx/cubas-sparse-and-scrappy-storefront-windows

Alexa Hoyer

Dec 28 2017,

 

Storefront window displays typically reflect the dreams and desires of consumerism and late capitalism. Under communist rule in Cuba, they reveal a very different story. From the Revolution through the “special period” following the fall of the Soviet Union and Castro’s death, window-dressers employed by the island nation's government-run advertising bureau were tasked with transforming actual scarcity into utopian visions of surplus and industry.

Struck by their enigmatic, sculptural, and out-of-time beauty, the Germany-born, Brooklyn-based artist Alexa Hoyerresearched and shot her photo series over a two-year period. Storefronts invites us to glimpse into the dreams and cultural subconscious of a country on the brink. "I'm sort of invisible. But there are really beautiful and wonderful things that are invisible, and that remain unseen," Romero Salazar, a window-dresser employed in Havana, told her.

Check out Storefronts below:

 

continued 

http://alexahoyer.com/

[dshapiro]

Interesting. I’ve definitely seen some of these up and down Galiano and Belascoain. 

[alloy]

Ummm...the middle picture, the "woman"s" panties have quite a "bulge" in them! 

[SignalJoe]

There's a certain elegance in the simplicity of those.  Almost like the simple bands on most Habanos.  

[Danimalia]

When I went to Havana back in '05, that was one of the things that was most unusual to me. The lack of stores and street-facing businesses. I remember seeing a few store fronts, and some bars/restaurants, but not many, and it was jarring having lived in the U.S. all my life.