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 Hoyer researched 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.
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Check out Storefronts below:
See the rest of the photos on Alexa Hoyer’s website.
