 I would also like to echo everyone's thanks to the barns, to Alia, and to Martha, especially for hosting us. I'm Nancy Locke from Penn State University, and I'm very pleased to present my doctoral advisor, Kerry Mangeluso. Kerry received her BA summa cum laude from the University of Florida with an honors thesis on August Zander's Man of the 20th Century. She worked as a K-1 teacher for Teach for America, and we like to joke that while teaching K-1 students, she learned a lot that she can apply as a TA with college students. She has now tackled a wide range of subjects in the history of photography, including a very fine MA thesis called Framing Death, Mirror's Masks, and the Objectness of Man Ray's Photographic Portraits. Work she drew on for a presentation at Surrealisms, the inaugural conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism last November. Kerry has been actively pursuing projects in digital art history at the Penn State Libraries, and she has curated or co-curated four exhibitions at the Palmer Museum of Art, including Myth Meets Modernism, the Manuel Alvarez Bravo portfolio, which will open this summer. Her dissertation, Bow House Dream House, The Uncharted Surrealism of New Vision Photography, will remap the boundaries between these two artistic movements as they intersected at the most famous art school of the 20th Century. Her paper today is entitled Reflections for Sale, Making Sense of Vegen Adjei's Bon Marché Photographs, 1926-27. Please welcome Kerry Mongeleuse. Again, thank you to everyone at the Barnes and Nancy for that lovely introduction. After several decades spent peddling his views of old Paris to members of countless professions, Eugen Adjei turned his camera toward the glistening facade of the department store. Three photographs of the Bon Marché display windows from 1926 to 27 signal a rupture in Adjei's production, evading scholars as to their function in the photographer's large-scale project. Absent are the frontally oriented storefront views of shops that fill a 1912 album of trades, boutiques, and displays. In their place stand conspicuous images of bourgeois consumption. Plate glass windows suspend reflections of the street, subsequently producing a disorienting montage of commodities, mannequins, and passers-by. Optically permeable but materially impenetrable, the shop windows of the Bon Marché operate as sites of collapse, where interior melds with exterior, display blurs with street, and glass surface fuses with that of the photograph. Despite their frequent reproduction in texts and exhibition catalogs, the late shop window views of the Bon Marché have yet to receive much critical attention. The immense size of Adjei's body of work alone poses problems, rendering close-looking and formal analysis of individual prints difficult. The scholar Mollie Nesbitt even denies the fruitfulness of the close examination of individual photographs by Adjei, stating, quote, the decoding of a single document leads nowhere in particular, end quote. Nesbitt instead advances an argument, first initiated by Roslyn Krause, suggesting that Adjei's images of CD alleyways and street kiosks operated as documents, which contributed to a range of professional knowledges. Not included in Nesbitt's discussion, however, are the views of the Bon Marché with their complex networks of actual and reflected images, questions pertaining to the kinds of knowledges, which could possibly be culled from such documents remain unanswered, as do those regarding any potential buyers. Around the time that his prince garnered unsolicited attention from the surrealists in the mid-1920s, Adjei turned away from the derelict shops discussed by Nesbitt in favor of the shimmering surfaces of the department store. This paper foregrounds the Bon Marché series as contingent upon the politics of the display and consumption of commodities in interwar Paris as a means to explore questions of interiority and identity formation. Drawing on the writings of Vaughte Benjamin, I argue that the shop window reflections in the Bon Marché series metaphorize, one, the demise of the interior as the repository of one's individual existence, and two, the interior subsequent refashioning into the constitutive site of the masses. The glass windows pictured in the Bon Marché photographs dissolve the plane separating viewer and commodity, while their sleek impersonal surfaces resist the accumulation of one's bodily traces. In contrast to the documentarian's early views of storefronts and Parisian interiors, which operate as inventories of things, the Bon Marché photographs substitute a physical glut of material goods for a superficial spectacle of visual excess. Since its inception, the Bon Marché marked a space of consumption quite different from that of the small shops photographed by Atché. With the opening of an annex in 1899 and an expansion in 1912, the store stretched across the intersection of the Chaudesève and the Chaude d'Houbeck in order to accommodate the displays of increasingly varied categories of products for sale. In his history of the Bon Marché, Michael Miller notes how the department store stood at the center of consumer culture, which in turn intertwined with bourgeois culture. Rather than merely showcasing one's wealth by wearing the most up-to-date fashions, members of the bourgeoisie performed their class with each trip to the department store. Although the Bon Marché, in theory, welcomed Parisians of all classes with its policies of free admission, no purchase necessary, and standardized pricing, it unequivocally promoted the bourgeois consumption of luxury goods. Atché's early prints of small shops and street kiosks, however, forego glitz for grime, passing over the high modernity represented by Haussmann's Grand Boulevard in favor of the low modernity of old Paris. A product of the photographer's early morning sessions and his relatively long exposure times, views of empty streets account for a large percentage of Atché's early work. In his 1931 essay, Little History of Photography, Walter Benjamin upholds Atché as the busoni of photography, the forerunner of surrealist photography who, quote, wiped off the mask and set about removing the makeup from reality, end quote. After emphasizing Atché's preference for hand carts and rows of boots over Parisian landmarks, Benjamin equates the city in Atché's photographs with a tenetless dwelling, quote. Remarkably, however, almost all of these pictures are empty. They are not lonely, merely without mood. The city in these pictures looks cleared out like a dwelling that has not yet found a new tenet. It is in these achievements that surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings, end quote. In the place of human figure stand material objects, ephemeral goods, refuse, and architectural details. It is within the surfaces of material things that Atché reveals the human element in a kind of subjective interiority. Atché's later work, however, complicates matters as the Beaumache photographs seemingly dissolve the distance between viewer and commodity and yet obscure the material surfaces of things behind an expanse of reflective plate glass. The photographs in Atché's 1912 album of shops highlight overflowing displays, both in and outside, which predominantly catered to a working class consumer. Eventually, these kinds of displays grew so large as to spill out onto the street and incite cries for regulation. In the name of hygiene, the current prefect of the Seine levied ordinances that restricted which goods could be sold and how goods could be displayed. These limits on display targeted the small shops, but hardly impacted the department store. According to interwar critics and consumers, the display of goods as shown in Atché's early prints would be deemed quote unquote vulgar and repellent since quote, objects need to be isolated for the display to be considered in good taste. Rather than spilling out onto the pavement of the sidewalk in the street, however, the Beaumache displays in Atché's photographs exhibit restraint and their containment of goods to the interior. Following the influential exhibition of boutiques at the Salon d'Oton in 1924, luxury shops and department stores grew increasingly invested in staging quote unquote discrete displays. Tag Groenberg summarizes this change in early 20th century approaches to display, noting that to be considered a modern, a store must be parsimonious in its presentation of goods. This new preference for sleek displays, however, posed a challenge for the department store tasked with selling to consumers in large quantities. Although their displays eventually featured fewer goods in the 1920s, the department store continued to rely on the reflective potential of polished surfaces to offer multiple views of commodities for sale. With the aid of mirrors, the Beaumache substituted the physical glut of goods for a kind of visual excess. Albeit in aid to surveillance, the mirrored surfaces of the department store equally afforded shoppers, the ability to see themselves reflected among and thus identify with a sea of consumers like them. Consumers who were trying on identical hats, perusing similar fashions and standard sizes and paying fixed prices. This, quote, unquote, theatrical element of commerce as described by Benjamin was exclusive to the department store and consequently generated the conditions under which, quote, consumers began to consider themselves amass, end quote. Ashes Beaumache series showcases one such mirror-like surface, the plate glass window. These glazed facades mimic the mirror reflecting views of the city and merging them with commodities and mannequins. This overlap of space at the site of the window not only challenges the viewer to confront the objects for sale behind the glass or the reflections of the exterior world upon it, but forces the recognition of the glass itself as an object. Both transparent and reflective so as to simultaneously render goods visible and present the window shopper with one's own gaze of desire, the glass surface proves indispensable to the process of capitalist seduction and the fetishization of the commodity. Apprehended in the Beaumache window, reflected images of additional display mannequins across the Chaudubac and behind the photographer further compress the space and heighten the illusory character of the display. Sandwiched between mannequins and glass panes, the window shopper on the street unable to escape is thrust into a world in which real and unreal merge. Classifying the window reflections as accidental, Man Ray and his off-sided comments on Ashes' work frame the documentarian as an amateur who was frankly unaware of what he was doing. In a 1955 letter sent to fellow photographer Minor White, Man Ray writes, quote, Ashes worked with an old 18 by 24 centimeter camera and a brass rectilinear lens, probably F8, which he stopped down for depth. No shutter was used, just a cap over the lens. The blurred figures were not intentional any more than the reflections in the windows with his limited means it just came out that way. End quote. Although Man Ray perpetuates a common myth of Ashes, the older photographer's body of work demonstrates his skill in preventing unwanted reflections. One image from 1910 to 1912 reveals Ashes' astuteness having photographed the shop from a frontal perspective across the street. A second frames a collector's cabinet. It's two glass covered front doors thrown open to avoid any interference and further call attention to the knickknacks on display. Ashes' very decision to open the cabinet doors prevented the obstruction of tactile objects, objects stripped of their use in exchange values and thus liberated from the cycle of capitalist consumption. As evidenced by the photograph of the collector's cabinet, the fontesiecle interior oozes with traces of its occupant, indexing forms of contact upon its plush surfaces. Furnishings, mirrors, and objects crowd the residences of a range of artists, collectors, working people, and members of the bourgeoisie. Benjamin discusses such interior furnishings in relation to identity formation and his essay, Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, quote. The bourgeois has shown a tendency to compensate for the absence of any trace of private life in the big city. He tries to do this within the four walls of his apartment. It is as if he has made it a point of honor not to allow the traces of his everyday objects and accessories to get lost. Indifatigably, he takes the impression of a host of objects for his slippers and his watches, his blankets and his umbrellas. He devises coverlets and cases. He has a marked preference for velour and plush, which preserve the imprint of all contact. It is the style characteristic of the Second Empire. The apartment becomes a sort of cockpit. The traces of its inhabitant are molded into the interior, end quote. In contrast to the bourgeois interior, which functions as a cockpit or control room of sorts for the individual and its capacity to indelibly record one's bodily traces, the modern city epitomized the impersonal for Benjamin. Sleek facades and with mesmerizing display windows dissolve the boundaries between exterior and interior, between consumer and commodity, ultimately resting control of the process of identity formation away from the individual. The reflections in Asche's Beaumarche series metaphorize this shift while unmasking the deceptive transparency of the photographic medium. Whereas Asche's early prints seemingly offer up objects, the Beaumarche series with reflections, fashions and equivalents between plate glass and photograph, rendering their mediating functions visible. A single window spans the entire surface of each print of Asche's Beaumarche series, fusing glass surface with photographic plane. In contrast to the earlier storefront views, Geographic Specificity, which was afforded by the inclusion of signage and street addresses in both compositions and captions, the integrity of the department store deteriorates in Asche's series. Absent are logos and signage while the camera crops out almost all of the window's architectural frame. Several buildings meet in the background as mannequins gaze out toward the street. Asche's placement of his camera at an oblique angle, inches away from the facade, dramatizes the glass surface's capacity for reflectivity, indicting the shop window as a key player in the cycle of capitalist consumption and identity formation. In another print from the series, graphic signs plastered above the parallel display windows across the street reads sold Beaumarche many times over in reverse. Sales, sales, sales exclaim the signs to the window's shopper, tempting him to wander inside, to try on a suit, to test out a cane. Hand on the lens cap, eye on the ground glass, Asche gazes at his camera rather than the merchandise for sale before him. Instead of a boater's hat or a polished suit, Asche isolates a common moment from a consumer's daily life. Whereas Asche's interiors and early storefront views document the traces of one's individual existence through the display of tactile objects, his Beaumarche series littered with reflections, metaphorizes the demise of the interior as the site of identity formation at the hands of the department store. Upon the display windows and within the spectacular indoor environment of the gold magazine, consumers come to constitute themselves as a mass. In his Beaumarche series, Asche takes hold of the very methods employed by department stores to seduce bourgeois window shoppers, spectacularize consumption and entice a purchase only to subvert them, preventing a clear view of what can and cannot be bought and sold. Thank you.