A sardonic celebration of the distinctive commercial aesthetic that blossomed in the Europe of the 20th century's disintegrating authoritarian Communist governments
Visiting shops in the Iron More than 100 shop window photographs made by David Hlynsky during four travels to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow between 1986 and 1990 are featured in Curtain. Hlynsky documented the quiet, ordinary moments of daily life on the streets and in the storefronts of disintegrating Communist nations using a Hasselblad camera. 
 
The end effect may be a still life depicting the meeting point of a capitalist, consumerist tool—the shop window—and a communist philosophy, with the consumer caught in the middle. The shop windows were often decorated with classic yet oddly placed emblems of cheer: cozy lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and images of cheerful children. They were free of overt branding or deliberate seduction. Some storefronts were modest with their straightforward offerings of loaves and canned fish; others were zanily artistic, like the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some displayed intense professional pride, like the sign in a Prague beauty parlor showing a pedicurist grinning maniacally over an imperfect sole. 
 
Along with essays by cultural studies expert Jody Berland and art historian Martha Langford, the photographs include Hlynsky's own account of his time as a flâneur in the Soviet Union's crumbling shopping centers, which he describes as "a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia" that started to close in 1989. 176 photographs, 174 in color