city in photography

1. The City in Photography

2. • Landscape fed from early developments in
landscape painting
• photography of the city has its foundations in the
way urban spaces were beginning to be viewed in
the late 18th century and early 19 century.
• The visual complicity of a city as both an image
and an experience.
• First view we have of the city is in the work of
Louis Daguerre in Paris

3. Boulevard du Temple by Louis Daguerre 1839

4. • The city has always been celebrated in terms of
its central icons and these plot a visual hierarchy.
Skyscrapers church spires and towers
• The opposite of this is the street and the
negotiation of the place at eye level. Street level
engages with the clutter of the city , its chaos and
process it multiplicity and at times danger.
• To be a walker in a city is to engage with every
distinctive relationship within the urban scene.

5. • The camera negotiates between two poles the
horizontal and the vertical
• Public and private
• Detail and general
• Exterior and interior
• Historical and the modern
• Permanent and temporary
Dickens in the novel Bleak house asks the question
“What does the city mean and how can one
represent it”

6. Daguerre and Talbots early city scrapes keep the city at a distance and
in the most part the city remain invisible and anonymous
• Henry Fox Talbot – Nelson Column 1843

7. • However this was starting to change and it was in
Paris where this started to happen.
• In the early 1860s, Napoleon III commissioned
photographer Charles Marville to document the
city's transformation from medieval architectural
hodgepodge to modern metropolis.

8. • The camera started to act as a detective moving
through street scenes that were invisible to many.
Thomas Annan revealed the poverty on the streets
of Glasgow in 1839

9. New York
• Stiglitz the most sustained attempts to
photograph New York.
• Bought an idealism to the city that bordered
on the spiritual
• Dynamic and modern he photographed the
city divorced from the chaos that surrounded
it. 1902 he abandoned the street he empties
the city of any human existent.

11. • Other photographers of the time did inhabit
the streets
• Jacob riss hoe the other half lives – the
appalling conditions on Newyorks lower east
side
• He moves into forbidden and invisible urban
territory.
• Revelling both Private and public space

14. Bizarre and hidden
• The photographer roams the city in search of
the strange. A world of danger not of Stiglitz
ideal
• Weegee in the 1940s photographed the
underworld of Newyork using a police radio to
capture crime just as it happened
• Murder in hells kitchen 1940 is an example of
this

16. Study of street figures
Moving on the the crime and shock captured in
the city
Walker evans on the new york subway taken
with a concealed camera. People of the city
caught off guard but give a sense of urban
loneliness and separation
Myrewittz

19. • Later Bruce Davidson would continue the
work started by Evans in his subway series
captured in Newyork in the 1980s.
• Bruce Davidson's vivid underground
exploration of New York's subway system in
the 1980s is an epoch-defining series that
marked the photographer's shift from black
and white to c

22. Joel Meroywitz

27. • The enigma of the city as an experience and a
place of rich and dangerous problematic
subject for the camera