David Hlynsky’s Communist-Era Store Windows depicts advertising (or the lack thereof) in East European countries in the late 1980s. This kind of cleanliness is now unseen, Mac stores being the exception (I knew there was something totalitarian about Apple!). But cynicism aside, what strikes me is not so much the difference between the then and the now, but how similar in fact the windowdressings depicted in the series are to my own memories of Portugal (a non-communist country) in the 80s. Perhaps it’s wrong to see these images set in a capitalism vs communism context. I see them in a rampant-capitalism vs whatever-else context. Advertising just wasn’t such a big part of the overall economy back then.
Source: davidhlynsky.com
