Summary
- The city in Modernism
- The possibility of an urban sociology
- The city as public and private space
- The city in Postmodernism
- The relation of the individual to the crowd in the city
Gerog Simmel (1858 - 1918)
- German sociologist
- Writes 'Metropolis and Mentl Life in 1903
- Important as it influences critical theiry of the Frankfurt school thinkers e.g Benjamin
Dresden Exhibition 1903
Simmel was asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual
Herbert Beyer Lonely Metropolitan (1932)
- Comes from surrealism and dada
- Epitomises the idea of the individual who is surrounded by people but simultaneously alone
Urban Sociology
'The resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technoligical mechanism'
- Georg Simmel 1903
- Lewis Hine (1932)
- Man working on skyscraper
- Idea of the city 'engulfing' the human figure
- City in the background almost as a threat but also being dependent on the manual labour
Architect Louis Sullivan (1856 - 1924)
- Architect credited for being the creator of the modern skyscraper
- Influencial architect and critic of the Chicago school
- Coined the phrase that 'form followed function' in the 'Tall building artistically covered'
Guaranty Building
- Guaranty building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY
- Details on building come from the arts & crafts movement
- The inside of the building is tightly organised and ordered
- Divided into 4 zones - basement, ground (floor, street facing shops), office (identical office cells around the central elevator shaft), terminating zone
- Embellished in terracotta blocks (red colour)
- Sullivan was quoted as saying: 'it must be every inch a proud and soaring thing...'
Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)
- Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity
- A fire cleared buildings in Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan new aspirational buildings
- Made way for a new approach of architecture
Manhatta (1921) Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler
- An America that is built on immigration
- Documentary film by photographer Paul Strand and painted, Charles Scheeler
- 65 shots in a loose, non narritive structure
- Relationship between photography and film
- Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged in an abstract composition
Charles Scheeler
- Ford Motor Company's plant at River Rouge, Detroit (1927)
- No figures but depicts the city as a tower; a powerful and mechanical presence
- Commissioned to take this photographs (although he is a painter) as a $1.3 million advertising campaign
Fordism: Mechanised labour relations
- The human body becomes part of the machine
- Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay 'Americanism and Fordism'
- 'The eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardises low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them' - De Grazia 2005. p. 4
- The labourer is also the consumer
Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin
- Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in the film
- Portrays Chaplin as a factor worker employed on a factor line
- 'Force fed by a modern machine'
- He suffers a mental breakdown causing chaos
- Consumed and 'swallowed' by factory environment
Stock market crash of 1929
Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
Leads to 'great depression'
Margaret Bourke-White
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Silent documentary film
Explores the idea the role of the camera in the city
Range of cinematic techniques which Bertov 'invents'
This includes trapping shots, zooms, fast, slow motion,
Seeking to create a futuristic city which is a commentary on the existing world
Celebration of industrialisation, mechanism, transport etc
Focuses on intimate and personal situations swell as public and outdoor scenes
Flaneur
The term 'flaneur' comes from the French masculine noun 'flaneur' which has the basic meanings of stroller, lounger, saunterer, loafer which itself comes from the French verb, 'Flaner' which means 'to stroll'
The nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire proposes a version of the flaneur as 'someone/a figure who walks the city to experience it'
Walter Benjamin
- Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
- Arcades Project, 1927-40, Benjamin's final incomplete book about the Parisian city life in the 19th century
- Interaction of the body and the city
- Berlin Chronicle/Berlin childhood (memoirs)
Photographer as flaneur
Susan Sontag on Photography:
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world 'picturesque'
Flaneuse
- Alternative of the flaneur - a female version
- Janet Wolff looks at this idea in 'The Invisible Flaneuse'
- "The literature of modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life int he metropolis, mainly accounts for the experiences of men..."
- She suggests this time was when women were never seen alone on the street
Susan Buck-Morss
In this text, she suggests that the only figure a woman on the street can be is either a prostitute of a bag lady
Arbus/Hopper
Woman at a Counter Smoking, NYC (1962)
- Observed moment
- Distant
- Sense of threat
Edward Hopper - Automat (1927)
- Darkness surrounds the female figure, adding depth
- The representation of the blackness is deeper and darker around the head and shoulders
- Foreboding manner
Sophie calle 'Suite Venitienne' (1980)
- She creates a photographic piece of work that is a reflection of the city
- 'For months I followed strangers on the street... I photographed them without their knowledge'
- Document of a following, similarly to a diary
- The act of following encourages obsessive reflection
Venice
- City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time will always end up back where you begin
- This idea is also evident in 'Don't look now' (1973) Nicholas Roeg - issues of memory, trauma of grief; but also plays on the idea of time
The Detective (1980)
- Asks her mother to get a private detective to follow her - role reversal
- Leads him on a walk/journey around Paris which is ultimately controlled by her
- Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence
- His photos and notes on her are displayed next to her photos and notes about him
- Evidence; what is truth
- Contrast between visual evidence and written account
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills (1977 - 80)
- Female stereotypes come from film noire
- The woman is almost lost or trapped by the city
- Low angle viewpoints
- Also shot the base of the World Trade Centre
'The shots of the World Trade Centre don't look like the World Trade Centre unless you knew the towers well. I wasn't trying to take (stereotypical) photographs of Manhattan... unidentifiable locations which look like they could be anywhere'.
Weegee (Arthur Felig)
Dark side of the Lower East side of NYC
Follows the emergency services and documents their activity
Pursues the incident in a similar way to how the Police do
Had a mobile darkroom and developed photographs at the scene resulting in instantaneous reporting
His images were collected in a book entitled 'The Naked City' in 1945
The book was translated into a film in 1848 with the same name
LA Noire (2011)
The first video game to be shown at the Tribecca Film Festival
Based on film noire techniques and characteristics
Challenges the player to control the police department
Incorporates 'MotionScan' where actors are recored by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle. The technology is central to the game's interrogation mechanic, as players must use the suspects reactions to questioning to judge whether they are lying or not.
Fritz Lang 'Metropolis (1929)
Cities of the future/past
Futuristic, cybord
Ridley Scott 'Bladerunner' (1982/2019)
Depicts the city in the future
Lorca diCorcia Heads (2001) NY
- He sets up a trip effect with flash lighting in a certain spot on the street
- When a person walks in into the area, the photographer can activate the flash
- Detached observer; not seen by the subjects - idea of surveillance
- Alienated subjects in the crowd
- Doesn't request permission
- Give a sense of heightened drama
- Insignificant facial expressions
In 2006, a New York trail court issued a ruling in a case involving one of his photographers. His subject was an Orthodox Jew who objected on religious grounds to diCorcia's publishing in an artistic exhibition a photograph taken of him without his permission.
- Anything that happens on the street is available for artistic interpretation
Walker Evans 'Many are called' (1938)
- Made with the use of a hidden camera
- Evans travels on the subway in New York with a camera hidden in his trench coat
- Subjects do not know they are being photographed
- Private moments in the public space
Postmodern city
Ed Soja - The postmodern city
- Discusses the idea of becoming lost in architecture
- Submit to forms of overseeing
- The outside becoming the inside and vice versa
Joel Meyerowitz 'Broadway and West 46th Street NY' (1976)
'Offers an eye level of confusion, although the image is full of detail, there is no sense of unity'.
The city reflects this mental state itself
9/11 Citizen journalism: the end of the flaneur?
Liz Wells says the phrase, 'Citizen journalism' is first seen in an article by Stuart Allen Online in 2006. She discusses the 7/7 bombings in London and the immediacy of the mobile phone images which recored the event as commuters travel to work. These images were online within an hour of the event.
- Replaces the use of journalism
- Different aesthetic
- Returns photography to its original use - a piece of evidence
- No longer a separation of the individual and the city
Adam Bezer 2001
- Citizen journalist
- Used his mobile phone to record evidence
- Took photographs as it happened
Surveillance City
"Since the attack on the Twin Towers of the WTC in 2001 and the ensuing 'war on terrorism' there has been an enormous ramping up of investment in machine reading technologies..."
