vienna

situated in the cross-disciplinary field of “visual studies” alone.
For Bredekamp this field is “everything that the narrowest definition
art history is not”. 210 This research field covers disciplines from
anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, visual
culture and symbolic interaction to documentary photography. 211
One person who is often cited in visual culture studies 212
is the photographer Eugene Atget, among the first to portray
urban life in Paris with his camera at the beginning of the
twentieth century. His “direct and frank” 213 gaze fell not only on
the streets, but also on storefronts. Beaumont-Maillet describes
Atget’s gaze as follows:
“Even though Atget’s work is photography reduced to its essential
self, without contrivance, without pretensions, his images
have the tragic quality of ordinary things. They create “that
salutary movement whereby man and the world around him
become strangers to one another.” 214
These “documents”, not acknowledged as art in his times, 215
have found their way into the archives of museums today as
well as into research on visual culture. This shows that Pink’s
arguments might not apply today, or, that they should be discussed
by later generations of scholars. The research photos that
the following chapters are based on are also “documents” or
“working images” . The selection has been undertaken with the
intention of exemplifying each shopping street with one view.
The examples are presented in chronological order as if a shopper
had walked down each of the shopping streets. The visual
tension created by a few examples thus conveys the overall
atmosphere of the seasonal sale in each of the shopping streets.
It is assumed that it is possible to reconstruct the nature of the
seasonal sale by observing one single event. 216 In addition to
the four cities Paris, Vienna, London and Hamburg, there is yet
another fashion capital: New York. The chapter on New York is
an excursion into the field of art and performance studies but it
does not include any images of a field research. The assumption
210 Bredekamp (2003:428).
211 Ibid.
212 See Mirzoeff (1999:76).
213 Beaumont-Maillet (1992:28).
214 Ibid., p 27.
215 Except by the surrealists.
216 Smaller investigations conducted before and after confirmed this assumption.
Intuitive Images
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