Introduction–Urban Image Now: Photographic and Filmic Manifestations of a Subjective City Experience

Abstract

This special issue of Visual Resources investigates the forms and outcomes of contemporary artists’ dialogues with the city. While photographers have historically approached the city from both a documentary and journalistic perspective, the photographers presented here tackle the subject as conceptual endeavor, often blurring the line between photography and film, the documentary photograph and fine art print, and the historical account and instantaneous description. Which routes do artists take to depict the city and how have they shifted in recent years? What are the languages employed to capture individual and, at times, highly subjective views of the city? How do the uses of analog and digital media, of still image, video, and film, respectively, influence the assessment and construction of urban space? The authors in this special issue ask these questions highlighting the subjective angle of the photographer, while he or she uses a medium, which, despite the recognition of its postdocumentary loss of the claim for truth, still triggers expectation of objectivity and veracity. It is this tension between the attribution of photography, as subjective and objective medium respectively, and the blurring of these categories that constitutes the core concern of this special issue.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Film
• City
• Urban Imagery
• Visual Culture
• Human Geography
• Subjectivity

Notes

1 Graham Clarke, The Photograph, Oxford History of Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 98.

2 Yi‐Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 136.

3 By artistic photographic image I mean images that were created as part of an artist’s oeuvre and not as the result of a photojournalistic assignment or amateur photo activity.

4 See, for example, Judith Butler’s ethical reflections on individual responsibility in her Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) and two very different publications both dealing with perceiving the subject in the city: Vittoria di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri, eds., Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (London: Routledge, 2009) and the controversial German publication by Elke Krasny and Irene Nierhaus, eds., Urbanografien. Stadtforschung in Kunst, Architektur und Theorie (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 2008).

5 Derrick Price and Liz Wells, “Thinking about Photography: Debates, Historically and Now,” in Liz Wells, ed., Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 21.

6 This detachment is a notion analysts of the modern urban condition such as Georg Simmel (1858–1918) began to point out and describe eloquently in the early twentieth century. See particularly Simmel’s 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950).

7 This special issue does not address the work of contemporary photographers who stage and construct images in urban environments such as Jeff Wall (b. 1946), Philip‐Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), and Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962); their work, in different ways, talks about alienation.

8 John Berger, “Understanding a Photograph,” in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 291–95.

9 Berger, “Understanding,” 293.

10 Berger, “Understanding,” 292.

11 The topographical or spatial turn has been identified by human geographers such as Edward Soja during the last fifteen or so years and has found its expression in recent Anglo‐American and European publications and conferences such as the Berlin Academy of the Art’s “Topos Raum” conference in 2005 and in publications including Edward Soja, “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination,” in Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre, eds., Human Geography Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 260–78; Marc Auge, Non‐Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London and New York: Verso Books, 1995) trans. John Howe (original title, Non‐Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992); and Gillian Rose, “Performing Space,” in Massey, Allen, and Sarre, Human Geography Today, 247–59.

12 Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lessen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2006), 10. Another excellent source for the time–space relationship in cultural and media studies is Stephan Günzel, ed., Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur‐ und Medienwissenschaften (Bielefeld: Transkript Verlag, 2007). “Der Ort hielt den Zusammenhang aufrecht und verlangte geradezu die gedankliche Reproduktion des Nebeneinander, der Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigkeit.” (My translation).

13 Schlögel, Im Raume, 11. “Auf der Höhe des 20. Jahrhunderts mit all seinen Schrecken, Diskontinuitäten, Brüchen und Kataklysmen.” (My translation).

14 See the outpouring of literature on the topic in the last ten or so years, for example, the German publications triggered by the German unification process: Bernhard Schlink, Heimat als Utopie (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp [Sonderdruck], 2000); Christoph Türcke, Heimat. Eine Rehabilitierung (Springe: zu Klampen, 2006); Roland Koberg, Bernd Stegemann, and Henrike Thomsen, eds., Ost/West–Ein Deutscher Stoff. Plötzliche Erinnerung an einen Unterschied. Das Deutsche Theater und die Debatte eines wiedervereinigten Landes (Berlin: Henschel, 2005); also Lucy Lippard’s 1997 book The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press); and bell hooks’ recent book Belonging: A Culture of Place (London: Routledge, 2009). A tremendously influential figure for some of these thoughts is certainly the human geographer Yi‐Fu Tuan and his publications Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974) and Space and Place (see note 2).

15 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

16 Clarke, The Photograph, 99.