The car gets there first. Its dark roof and the long curve of a door fill the bottom third of the frame, a smooth unlettered shape that the camera has rendered almost as pure tone, and behind it the whole rest of the picture is nothing but words. Atlas Seed & Hardware has turned its windows into a wall of hand-lettered offers — PAINT, SAND, CEMENT, GRAVEL, SALT OF ALL KINDS, KNIVES OF ALL KINDS, AMMUNITION, WATER SOFTING — white on black glass, stacked column after column until the storefront reads like a page. Winter has framed it flat and frontal, the way you would copy a document, so that the building gives up its depth and becomes a surface of language.
What the photograph is about, finally, is that collision: the mute rounded metal in front and the talkative glass behind. The car says nothing and tells you the year; the windows say everything and tell you the town. Between them the camera notices small accidents an inventory would miss — a star penciled beside SALT, the misspelling in WATER SOFTING, the company name running off the top edge mid-word. These are the things description is good at and argument is not.
Winter made this in 1972, in Ohio, when he was young and looking hard at ordinary American streets, and the picture holds up because he trusted the plain fact of the place over any comment on it. He let the signs do their own talking and kept the frame honest. The result is dense, funny, and exact — a storefront that has written its own caption, with a parked car for punctuation.
The car gets there first. Its dark roof and the long curve of a door fill the bottom third of the frame, a smooth unlettered shape that the camera has rendered almost as pure tone, and behind it the whole rest of the picture is nothing but words. Atlas Seed & Hardware has turned its windows into a wall of hand-lettered offers — PAINT, SAND, CEMENT, GRAVEL, SALT OF ALL KINDS, KNIVES OF ALL KINDS, AMMUNITION, WATER SOFTING — white on black glass, stacked column after column until the storefront reads like a page. Winter has framed it flat and frontal, the way you would copy a document, so that the building gives up its depth and becomes a surface of language.
What the photograph is about, finally, is that collision: the mute rounded metal in front and the talkative glass behind. The car says nothing and tells you the year; the windows say everything and tell you the town. Between them the camera notices small accidents an inventory would miss — a star penciled beside SALT, the misspelling in WATER SOFTING, the company name running off the top edge mid-word. These are the things description is good at and argument is not.
Winter made this in 1972, in Ohio, when he was young and looking hard at ordinary American streets, and the picture holds up because he trusted the plain fact of the place over any comment on it. He let the signs do their own talking and kept the frame honest. The result is dense, funny, and exact — a storefront that has written its own caption, with a parked car for punctuation.