Hi everyone,
If you are following the city module blog or enjoy its urban content I’ve now moved to a new blog entitled the IUD research blog. Please check it out.
I work with a group entitled the Institute for Urban Dreaming. The new blog reflects our research interests. We will be launching a new website also in November 2014 for IUD. Have a look at the new site and follow it.
Thanks for all you support to date.
John
What can one learn about the world just by stopping and looking at the city? Do we really observe what is actually taking place before us or do we simply concentrate on what interests or intrigues us? Are we more concerned with the unusual, the exotic or the peculiar rather than the legion of ordinary details that occur before us? The French writer George Perec turned his gaze onto the ordinary and the everyday details, movements and rhythms around him terming it the ‘infra-ordinary’. Perec, like other writers like Henri Lefebvre, has inspired many researchers to explore this realm as an valuable area of exploration.
What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep going up! Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals…
What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.”
Perec offers us an approach for looking at the everyday world around us. It asks us to slow ourselves down, look, be reflexive and question our own frameworks of perception.
“You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless…. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag…Question your teaspoons…”
Perec argues that in this process we need:
“To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us.”
This week will focus on a project Perec undertook in 1974 where he spent three successive days (a Friday, Saturday and Sunday) observing everyday life in the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Each day he chose a different cafe to sit in to observe the space.
“My intention… was to describe…that which is not taken note of, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.”
Perec examines the world as it appears to him. He is not interested in abstractions but in the things, the movements, the micro-events and the behaviours of people. He does reflect on his attention and how a cup of espresso may produce a different result to a bottle of water (Vittel).
See Michael Sheringham Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, Chapter 7.
Initially, William H. Whyte studied issues of urban planning and design, until 1969, when he assisted the New York City Planning Commission in drafting a comprehensive plan. While working with the Commission, he came to wonder how these newly planned spaces were actually working out.
No one had researched this before.
He applied for and received a grant to study the street life in New York and other cities in what became known as the Street Life Project. With a group of young research assistants, and camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies on pedestrian behavior and research on city dynamics.
‘“Transform the world,” proclaimed Marx; “change life,” argued Rimbaud. Andre Breton, Surrealism’s self appointed leader, noted that both these sentiments ‘are one for us’. Capitalism, the Surrealists argued, had created an everyday that was alienated and impoverished. They felt we needed a personal as well as a social revolution. For them the everyday was not the realm of the banal that it appeared to be. It was our habits of mind or the habitual ways in which we engaged with the world that caused us perceive and experience it that way. For them the everyday, if truly revealed, was in fact the realm of the marvellous.
In order to break free from these habitual ways of being they explored a number of strategies. The use of ‘psychic automatism,’ thought without control, was one such attempt to negate the limiting control of reason. Here they engaged in such practices as automatic writing, hypnotic trances, the game of creating ‘exquisite corpses’ or any method that made the subject responsive to chance encounters. What they looked for was the ‘spark’ produced by such juxtapositions to open up the mind to the true nature of the world. In this instant ones suppressed psychological landscape merged with the outer world in a true experience of the world they termed ‘surreality’.
Another such strategy for liberation was to explore the city, seek out its edges and forgotten corners in an attempt to find the raw, the primitive, the natural and the out moded. All of these had the potential to disrupt the bourgeois coherence that was paraded as ‘reality’. The transformative spark, they believed, could also be found through chance encounters in the street.
The pre-war paintings by the metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico offered them a glimpse of topography where the personal inner world and the outer physical realm merged into a haunting dream surreality.
“How often have we found ourselves in that square where everything seems so close to existence and yet bears so little resemblance to what really exists. It was here, more than anywhere else, that we held our invisible meetings.” Andre Breton, Le Surrealisme et La Peinture.
This weeks lecture examines how photographic practitioners can use historical archives, both institutional and personal, as a springboard for engaging with the people, places and stories of the city. It does this through examining the techniques of repeat photography or rephotography as it is also known by and the technique of photo elicitation.
Berenice Abbott’s work Changing New York for instance, captured for many the city as it was in the 1930’s. Between 1997 and 2003 Douglas Levere photographed the same sites as Abbott did using an 8×10 Century Universal camera like Abbott had. attaching a transparency of Abbott’s image onto his cameras ground glass he achieved the same angle of view. He also photographed at the same time of year and time of day as Abbott had. If the weather was bad he often waited a year before trying again. The resulting work was a classic repeat photography project he entitled New York Changing.The visual dialogue the new body of work creates next to Abbott’s originals reveals how much New York has changed over the sixty years since the initial record was made.
Rephotography comes from the original concept of repeat photography. Repeat photography is a technique that has been used in the natural sciences as far back as the 1880s to monitor changes in the landscape.
Douglas Levere was influenced by Mark Klett’s work Second View: The Rephotography Survey Project. This project from the late 1970’s rephotographed sites initially recorded by William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan in the 1860’s & 1870’s. The Rephotography Survey Project (RSP) did images on over eighty five sites in several states.
In 1997 Klett began the next phase by returning to the same historic sites and undertaking another rephotographic survey entitled Third View. In a later work entitled Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers he teamed up with Bryon Wolfe to produce a new take on the rephotography approach.
Recently there have been other new takes on the rephotography theme. The Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov takes elements from different historical eras and combines them effect in the same scene to dramatic.
Urban exploring continues today but takes a variety of forms.
http://www.curiouslyincongruous.net/stratford_marsh/
http://popupcity.net/2011/05/top-5-apps-for-exploring-the-city/
The 1789 Revolution
Politically France went from:
A absolute monarchy under Louis XVI to
a constitutional monarchy to
a republic to
a period of ‘The Terror’ to
the rule of Napoleon.
Napoleon’s rule had the appearance of a republic but was really a type of ‘military monarchy’. Although it betrayed the republics ideals economically the new order brought a liberal system of rights & economic prosperity.
“It created the basis of the capitalist economy in France, free from governmental directives, and was regulated strictly according to the system of open competition.”
Johann Friedrich Geist – Arcades- The History of a Building Type
Medieval Paris
Merian Map of Paris (scale: ca.1 to 7,000), 1615
“Nothing could give a foreigner more pleasure than the sight of a Parisian with his elaborate wig, white stockings, and lace trimmed suit, as he wades through or jumps over a muddy stream, runs through the filthy streets on tiptoe, and defends himself from the dripping roof gutters with his taffeta umbrella. How he jumps into the air when he leaves the Faubourg St.Honore to eat and must dance around the dripping eaves! Piles of dirt, slippery pavement, greasy cart axles so many dangers to avoid! And yet he reaches his destination. On each corner he summons a shoe-cleaner and arrives safely with the “exception of a few spots on his stockings…”
Louis-Sebastian Mercie
Paris am Vorabend Revolution
W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project
This week’s afternoon lecture featured Eugene Smith’s legendary Pittsburgh project as an example of a more extreme ‘completist’ strategy to uncovering the urban. Smith famously undertook the freelance job in 1955 after quitting Life magazine and joining Magnum. Tired of the constraints imposed by Life’s editorial board, Smith saw that Pittsburgh offered him the chance to create a new type of work that spoke of the complexity of the world itself. He wanted to take the photo-essay to new ends, to create a photo story that would depict the city as if it were ‘a single collective person’. For Smith, a photojournalist had to get ‘to the heart of something.’ Simply showing the surface was not enough. As he noted he was not content with simply being a ‘seeing’ photographer.
“The greatest responsibility of the photo historian or journalist is the search through the maze of conflictions to the island of intimate understanding, of the mind, of the soul, amid circumstances that both create and are created by – and then to render with intelligence, with artistic eloquence, a correct and breathing account of what is found, and popular fancy, myth can be damned. Meaning: to get to the guts of the matter and show the bastards as they are.”
Despite the limitations of the photo-essay Smith believed that it still offered him a means of ‘coherent interpretation’ as it links the artist-journalist to the world and to their audience. In his attempt weave together the complex themes that made up Pittsburgh he drew on sources such as Joyce’s Ulysses, on Faulkner’s writing and Jazz.
This weeks lecture discusses the idea of “the project’ as a means to engage with the urban environment. It asks students to consider how the use of different media and technology could be utilised to uncover the complex layering of the processes and sociality that orchestrate and produce urban space. It asks photographers to consider how audio could open up the hidden layers through oral histories and the use of soundscapes. It poses the question what other elements of the sensorium could be engaged as a different type of lens to engage the urban.
Key Project: The Hackney Podcasts
Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringhan in the first chapter of their book The Art of the Project comment how many contemporary cultural practices often involve the setting up of ‘experiments’ or ‘projects’. They comment how these so-called projects are defined by having a clearly designated spatial location in which they take place and a course of action that determines what is to be done and how frequently it is to occur. They are also governed by a strict set of self-imposed ground rules that guide the execution of the project itself.
Gratton and Sheringham note how such programmes of action are often indicative of the ‘ethnographic turn’ in art production, drawing influence from sociological, anthropological or documentary concerns. Equally such projects owe a debt to conceptual art with their playful, ironic or absurdist elements. The emphasis of such projects is not on the end result but on the process of undertaking the project itself according to the predetermined set of rules. The final results take a variety of differing forms that somehow produce an account of what took place.
Key Project: Tokyo Blues
This first lecture outlines a number of global contexts within which later issues and debates will be sited. It discusses how our world is moving from being a global village to being an urban globe. It highlights how for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will be living in towns and cities. This new urbanization raises issues around resources, poverty, governance and social justice. It asks us to question the future of the city and whose interests it will represent.
The city module aims to help you to develop your photographic practice by placing it in the context of the issues and debates that underpin the contemporary urban environment. Through a series of lectures, screenings, site visits and seminars it will outline the social, economic and cultural factors that underlie the modern city. The module will critically explore the ideas and practices that photographers have employed when engaging with the built environment and assess their contribution to our understanding and experience of the urban. It will ask you as participants to enquire into the city, its possible futures and the potential role(s) of photography in its representation and development.
The City beckons us. It calls us into its streets. It draws us into its arenas of glass and metal. It whispers to us to explore its darkened alleys and deserted ruins. Its sirens coerce us to leave the quiet of our homes to wander its temples of consumption and liquid imagery. It is here that we search; it is here that we seek to find its heart. Welcome to the Urban Age.
Key terms: World City / Global City, Megacities, Mobilities
thecitymodule 