Shop windows have long fascinated Mirjam Wiesemann. In 2010 she began photographing window displays in Rome; further pictures followed in 2011 and 2012 on trips to Barcelona, London, Los Angeles and Paris, and in 2013 and 2014 in cities such as Amsterdam, Arles, Geneva, Munich and Zurich. Among hundreds of shots she became increasingly aware that the real fascination lay in what was hidden: behind and between the objects on display, in the merging of foreground and background, and in the reflections that place things in new contexts of meaning. Seen through the eye of the camera, these “illusory worlds” often seemed to her more real than the ostensibly real ones.
Once the photographs existed, people told her unprompted what they saw in them. Wiesemann wrote down many of these spontaneous comments and decided to ask people of different age groups about her pictures and to invite them to take part – a further level of reflection. The art book thus sets a selection of the shop-window pictures beside texts by contributors aged between 7 and 80, ranging from brief interjections to prose miniatures and poems. In a picture from Düsseldorf, for instance, some see a house made of drinking straws, coral or fuse beads, others a burning tower block or a high-wire act.
Wiesemann sums up her experience in the sentence “Wir sehen mehr durch die Augen der Anderen” (we see more through the eyes of others). For her, every text and every picture is a microcosm; only when they are seen together does a hidden, shared story become visible. Mirjam Wiesemann is an author, publicist and actress. In 2004 she founded Cybele Records’ audiobook series Wort&Musik with Vera Forester and Ingo Schmidt-Lucas and is its artistic director; in 2009 came the edition Künstler im Gespräch, which she launched together with Ingo Schmidt-Lucas.
The hardcover volume in 210 x 277 mm format has 164 pages with colour illustrations and was published by Cybele Records in 2014. It appeared together with the audiobook of the same name (Cybele EKB 1401-H3D), in which Mirjam Wiesemann, Tara Wiesemann and Renate Wiesemann-Fuchs read a selection of the texts, with music from the Cybele catalogue taking the place of the pictures. Art book and audiobook were first presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2014.
For Wiesemann a changed way of looking arose from this, a second reality: what she thought she knew appeared in a different light, and what emerges only at the second or third glance became more important than the visible. In the book the texts stand beside the images with the contributors’ first names, several of them to one and the same photograph — one sees in it the decay of matter, the next a scene from office life, the third an approaching brass band.