For a while, I worked arranging the shop window display for a large charity shop in Peckham. One morning, as I arrived, I glanced at the lemon yellow window I had dressed the previous week and noticed that every piece of clothing was spattered with red-brown spots — bloodstains. The manager had been punched in the nose by a man he had accosted for shoplifting and his blood sprayed all over the shop . They had cleaned everything except the things in the window. It had been like that for several days. Much later I became interested in the windows of shops that have closed down, or are being refurbished. Because the window is a display case for the shop as a whole, it is usual to conceal what is going on inside until the new store or new display is ready. But the act of concealing itself becomes an artwork, as the brushstrokes and drips of white emulsion on the inside of the glass recall abstract expressionism, with Cy Twombly scratches or Basquiat drawings, or maybe paper wrappings reminiscent of Christo. I like the contrast between this kind of accidental abstraction and the flamboyant art of window dressing, pioneered by people like Frank L. Baum, who, as the author of The Wizard of Oz, proved to be a master of phantasmagoria. Obscured windows sometimes signify the arrival of hard times, but can also represent that which precedes and perhaps precipitates the recession: the rapid turnover of an overheated capitalism, in which new stores open and close almost weekly. These windows, photographed over several years, rarely feel ominous to me. But then, nor did my lemon yellow display, until I noticed the blood.

BACK