Michael Padnos Photography

Portfolios:

Paris

Provence

USA

Italy

Copenhagen

What's New

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I take pictures of store windows.

That means I take pictures of the mannequins, products, customers and sometimes clerks or vendors inside the stores; and I include in the photographs the reflections of the passers-by, the clouds in the sky, the cars, buses or trucks on the street, and the buildings facing the store. My object is to combine the image of the contents of the window with the image of the reflections on the window - by definition two wholly unrelated images - into one single image that is interesting, or profound, or funny, or all of the above. In other words, I try to capture an object that is platonically ordinary - a shop window - and to convert it into something new: something mysterious and beautiful.

I am happy when a viewer can look at my pictures and wonder about the relation between the interior of the shop and the reflection on the window. And I am supremely delighted when a viewer tells me that my pictures have given him or her a new way to see the world, an unanticipated pleasure in a moment that was previously seen as dull, routine, banal. Comments like these make me think that my pictures have actually added something to the lives of others.

The photographs were taken with a Pentax K10D digital camera. When they are shown in galleries they are mounted on a simple aluminum chassis with no other framing: there is never any (reflecting!) glass between the viewer and the image and never any border, white, black or other.