Photography as urban narrative

Abstract

Questioning whether we think as much about how we write as to what we write, I undertook recently a more rigorous reflection on what I saw as an exercise in ‘writing the city into the urban’. As I encountered the risk of writing the city out of the urban, I sought to write the city (creatively) back into the (critical) urban. It involved a gesture where photographic images of the city offered new meanings to the textual abstraction of the urban. It is no small act, nor an innocent one. It is also a longstanding one in the representational practices of writing the city. The simple task of juxtaposing photographs with a text while offering new ingenious forms of ‘writing’, opens up questions of not only how these images could very well question the validity of the text but also how photography’s ability to generate an archive of the (city’s) present draws attention to its own ethnographic (im)possibilities and epistemological crisis.

Keywords:

• writing the city
• urban
• Chennai
• photography
• hinterland

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Dr Aurelie Varrel at EHESS, Paris, for having partnered with her on this initiative. Photographs were exhibited at Alliance Française of Madras where the enthusiastic participation of the wider public helped me think through some of the intellectually fussy questions in a more mundane manner. The author would also like to thank Dr Debbie Humphrey for suggesting that she write this essay in the first instance as well as acknowledge the patience of her editorial colleagues who have waited till the very last minute for her to pull this off. Matthew Gandy, reliable as always, provided very valuable comments. All photographs © Christophe Delory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pushpa Arabindoo

Pushpa Arabindoo is an Associate Professor in Geography & Urban Design at University College London where she is also a co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. Email: [email protected]

Christophe Delory

Christophe Delory is a French photographer based in France. His main work is in portrait photography. After studying mathematics, he graduated from the French Society of Photography and has since worked on several commissions around the world. For ten years, he photographed intellectuals while pursuing a personal work on craftsmen, as well as a photographic historiography of a Second World War bunker. Email: [email protected]