Bayard's Boutique.

This essay pursues a close reading of Hippolyte Bayard's Boutique d'épicier (1843), a photographic depiction of a Parisian shopfront that combines still life, street scene, and stratified social portrait. Interpreting this early specimen of negative-positive photography as a self-reflexive picture, the author explores rich analogies between photographs and vitrines (cabinets of curiosity, shopwindows), photographers and grocers (traffickers of exotic goods, philistines, chemical agents). Other considerations include the changeable nature of tastes, patterns of metropolitan consumption, and comparisons between Bayard's composition, photographs by Henry Talbot, and caricatures of the grocer by Honoré Daumier, Charles-Joseph Traviès, and Honoré de Balzac. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]