Vendor's Portraits, Király Street
While surveys generally focus on the residents of a particular area, we often have no information about the people who work there. However, these are the people who effect the character of a neighbourhood the most. Emőke Kerekes, in her series of portraits taken of shopkeepers of Király Street, reveal the great variety of retail types in the neighbourhood and the heterogeneity of their vendors. This heterogeneity suggests a variety of shoppers who frequent the street: they are all, from an other viewpoint, agents of various uses of the city, and consequently, offer contrasting visions for the street. In these images, each vendor or employee appears in a frontal perspective, usually gazing into the photographer's lens; the grocery, textile outlet, hardware store, boutique, vegetable stall, carpet shop, pharmacy, hairdresser, restaurant, bar, design store, art gallery, flower shop, and confectionary are revealed behind them as an accumulation of the paraphernalia of a profession.
