The Fourth Avenue Project Luly Yang Couture, Downtown Seattle I was on my lunch hour walking back to work one day when I came to the corner of Fourth Avenue and University here in downtown Seattle. On that corner there is the Cobb (a historic landmark built in 1910), several shops, a restaurant), and the pièce de résistance: Luly Yang Couture. It is a fabulous haute couture dress shop with *the* most beautifully decorated windows I have ever seen. Luly’s windows are filled with stunning bridal and evening gowns handcrafted from the finest European and Asian satins, silks and lace. Most of the dresses are accompanied by gorgeous accessories (shoes, handbags and jewelry), all displayed against this exquisite robin’s-egg blue backdrop. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, he referred to how Alice felt ‘through the looking-glass’: ‘and certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.’ That was exactly it. When I looked into Luly’s windows, it was as if the glass melted away. I stood mesmerized, watching the effect the reflections of ever-changing passersby and traffic had on her magnificent creations as the two realities coalesce into one amazing image. It was then that I had a sort of an aha! moment. So I returned to that corner several days later and took a few more photographs. Pleased with how they turned out, and inspired by the photography of the fabulous Heather Champ, Jerry Uelsmann, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, I thought it might be fascinating to return to that same corner and photograph it over time, throughout the seasons – as they changed both inside and out. And “The Fourth Avenue project” was born. « thumbnails « enlarge image « read more about this project