Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

A shop window in Paris, seen straight on in black and white, framed by two pilasters and a dark lintel, with two small lamps set into its ceiling. Against a pale back wall stand a naked child mannequin, armless, with pale hair, a limb lying at its feet; a row of dress forms on metal stands, their busts sheathed in dark cloth cut to a deep V; jointed arms that end in pins; limp dark arms; and a single male head with moulded hair above a white collar. An elongated display form leans diagonally on a metal arm, two small objects lie on the floor, and a curved dark form stands alone at the right. In the lower corner of the glass, the street faintly reflects itself.

Without colour the window turns clinical. The busts read as silhouettes, dark wedges on white, lined up under the two lamps like exhibits, and the eye goes to what is most human and therefore most unsettling: the child, naked, without arms, its head turned aside, its spare limb at its feet. Everything else in the window is a part. The child is almost a whole, and that is worse.

Photography has always had a weakness for the mannequin, a body that can be looked at without looking back. The Surrealists understood that the camera did not need to invent strangeness: it could find it ready-made in the street, in the half-dressed windows of ordinary shops. What such a picture preserves is a thing designed to disappear. Window displays are made to be dismantled, and this one, with its dismembered forms and single collar, lasted perhaps a season. The photograph has turned it into a relic, and like every relic it now asks for a reverence nobody asked of it: a row of dismantled dummies, kept for good, because someone stopped on a pavement and looked.