57th Street is a photographic series shot along the luxury retail corridor of Midtown Manhattan during the week of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Anticipating potential unrest, storefronts across the city sealed their windows with plywood.
Along 57th Street—one of the densest concentrations of global luxury brands—the gesture produced an uncanny transformation. Glass façades designed to seduce passers-by were replaced by blank wooden surfaces bearing only the names of the houses they concealed.
Stripped of their reflective displays, the stores appeared momentarily emptied of their theatrical apparatus. Luxury remained present only as a name.
The photographs document this suspended moment, when the architecture of spectacle was reduced to its bare structure and brands revealed themselves as signs detached from the objects they normally promise.
The series later became the artist book TwentySix Luxury Brands.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Prints available upon request
EXHIBITION VIEWS, 2022
Arsenal Contemporary, New York
57th Street with Paris Is Burning (mixed media sculpture).
57th Street with Paris Is Burning (mixed media sculpture).
TWENTYSIX LUXURY BRANDS, 2025
Published by Blurring Books
With texts by Vanessa Place and Dani Issler
Available at do you read me?! and Staple in New York and Yvon Lambert Bookshop in Paris
57TH STREET, WEARABLES
Limited editions
Limited editions