As Susan Sontag discusses in On Photography, the medium has changed the way we experience and understand the world. Her discussion focuses on the sort of quantum-indeterminacy of a photograph, existing simultaneously as both image and artifact, record and event in and of itself. She discusses how our society uses photographs, how they have become tools of power, defenses against anxiety, and “collecting the world.”(1) “The Powers of photography,” she writes, “have in effect, de-platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals.”(2) Sontag focuses largely on how we mediate our experiences through photography, and how photography has affected the way we approach, interpret and consume our surroundings. This especially comes to bear on how photography reflects and affects how we understand our built environment. Architectural and urban photography has a long history that really speaks to the negotiation between image and environment, and history and memory that photographs embody. Looking at how we have photographed and represented the built environment help to reveal how we conceive of it, as well as the impact these representations have on our conception.
From the inception of the medium, we have used photography to document and capture the built environment. In Jennifer Green-Lewis’s article, “‘Already the Past”: The Backward Glance of Victorian Photography,” she discusses the photograph’s early relationship with both truth and the past, noting how William Henry Fox Talbot’s work, from his seminal photograph of Lacock Abbey to his book of photographs of Queens College, “The Pencil of Nature,” influenced how people thought about both the medium and the subject. He particularly focused on “the injuries of time and weather,” and notes that “the spectator almost thinks he gazes upon a city of former ages deserted, but not in ruins, abandoned by man, but spared by Time.”(3) Green-Lewis emphasizes that Talbot’s conception of photography places the subject of the photograph securely in the past, and the photographing is, in some manner, a way of preserving things.
Sontag emphasizes the consumable and collectible nature of photographs. “To collect photographs is to collect the world,” she emphasizes early on, and indeed photography has been thought of a tool to collect and classify from a very early point in its history.(4) Green-Lewis notes how, in addition to the past, Victorian photography had a very close association with reality. In some essential way, the photograph is thought of as an accurate, objective representation of something that exists. Because photography is so closely linked with both past and truth, it becomes a mediator for each, and the past, as represented through a photograph becomes true. Conversely, truth becomes something that is past.
Venda Louise Pollock discusses how these Victorian associations with past and truth affected amateur photographic surveys of urban landscapes in the 1880s and 90s. The architects of these surveys aimed to create a sort of catalog of a city at a point in time, that could be shared amongst amateur photograph societies internationally. Starting with a collection of lantern slides created by the Boston Camera Club called Illustrated Boston, which inspired similar societies in Britain, these photographers attempted to create an image of their environments. The aim of these surveys was in one sense to document their landscapes, a goal that was deeply tied with what Timothy Mitchell refers to as a “western ‘oculo-centric’ paradigm, which represented the world as something to be seen, typically as framed by a detached, (supposedly) objective observer.”(5) They were designed to classify and catalog the built world. William Jerome Harrison, who spearheaded a survey of Warwickshire, aimed to “capture archaeology, architecture, landscape and scenery, ethnology, botany, geology, town life and documents relating to the country.”(6) Thus the impetus for these surveys treated the world, rather explicitly, as an exhibition, or as Sontag has it a ‘museum-without-walls.’(7) Pollock explains that while these surveys aimed for a systematic documentation of a town, the amateur photographers’ method was less than rigorous. In many cases the photographers, instead of thoroughly documenting their landscape, had a “tendency towards pretty pictures of their favoured haunts.”(8) Pollock explains that this tendency was tied not only to the lack of methodological rigor, but also to how these photographers understood themselves, and their communities. She ties this to the late 19th century emergence of national identities, and a kind of ‘geographical imagination’:
"Although Birmingham was a well-developed industrial city, the noted lack of urban and industrial imagery can be seen as reflective of the desire to visualize local individuality within the albeit predictable and prevalent aesthetic vocabulary that had come to signify the nation …The fact that the conduct of the survey was somewhat ad hoc means that rather than an audit of prominent sites, the photographers could be seen as capturing the Warwickshire they themselves accepted as indicative of place and then projecting it as such." (9)
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| "New Inns Hotel," Local Studies & History Department, Birmingham Images, Library of Birmingham. http://www.search.birminghamimages.org.uk/Details.aspx?ResourceID=820&PageIndex=5&KeyWord=photograph&DateFrom=1837&DateTo=1901&SortOrder=0&ThemeID=35 [My apologies for the watermark. I couldn't figure out how to capture and post without it.] |
The idea that photography is an objective medium is nearly as old as the medium itself, and while we can look at these surveys and know that the buildings they depict do or did exist, the processes of selection that these photographers engaged in mean that these collections are not total, or accurate representations of the cities. These photographers represented the city as they understood and interpreted it, as well as how they wanted to remember it. There is certainly something nostalgic about these surveys, which were taken during a time of relatively rapid industrialization, and partly out of a desire to preserve a rapidly changing landscape.
Pollock also explains how the meaning of the survey photographs has continued to evolve, become more complicated recently as some of the photographs have been digitized: “Parts of the Boston, Manchester and Birmingham Surveys are accessible on line and while accession details make reference to the surveys, actually recalling the specific survey images requires complex searching.”(10) This piecemeal digitization removes the photographs from the context of the physical album, and the accompanying annotations and anecdotes, which are essential for understanding the historical circumstances of their creation.(11) Thus decontextualized, these images gain an even greater sense of loss.
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| Ara Guler, "TURKEY. 1956. Winter arrives in the Sirkeci district of Istanbul." From the Magnum Collection.http://www.magnumpho |
Sontag writes that “photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal.”(12) For the Victorian amateur societies, this meant preserving certain aspects of their landscape in photographs, which lends itself to a certain type of nostalgia for a landscape never really existed as it is represented in the photographs. This nostalgia has remained a hallmark of urban photography throughout its history. Photographers of the urban landscape have attempted to capture the feeling of a lost moment, of a landscape that no longer exists, or that exists in a different way. Ara Guler’s photographs of Istanbul from the 1950s certainly get at this feeling of a moment somewhat frozen in the past. Ipek Tureli writes about Istanbul’s nostalgia in terms of a “longing for the former cosmopolitan character of the city,” which causes “visual and literary depictions [to] become important sites through which to imagine bygone times.”(13) Tureli’s article focuses on how contemporary discourses influence our understanding of these older collections, examining hoe they fit a certain narrative of a cosmopolitan past and peddle in a nostalgia that “selectively edits out conflict from public memory.”(14) Tureli explores how the meaning of Guler’s work has changed over time, and how the work that has become popular features a specific, consumable nostalgia. In this way it strikes a similar chord to the urban surveys of the Victorian photography societies, who whether consciously or not, were constructing an image of their environments that reflected an idealized past for consumption. I think it is important to note that this it is truly a multifaceted negotiation. Photographs both reflect and shape how we understand our surroundings, and our understandings further shape what we put in the frame.
Jennifer Green-Lewis asks how a photograph’s placement of truth in the past affects our understanding of the world: “… If the real is past, is the present itself unreal?”(15) It seems that these relationships lend themselves to a type of nostalgia. Venda Louise Pollock points to the confluence of these factors with emerging local and national identities in the late 19th century. She writes that the era was “steeped with intertwining, heightened narratives of preservation and identity, can be seen as a crystallization at a point where there was a sense that memory could be torn and as such there was a need to counter this through the creation of permanent (photographic) memorials.”(16) I might suggest that this sense that “memory can be torn” is not necessarily unique to Victorian photographers, as we have since continued to photograph with the same or greater fervor, in an effort to document and preserve, in a sense even own, our histories, experiences and our environments.
1 Susan Sontag, On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux pg. 3-9.
2 Ibid., 179.
3 Henry Fox Talbot cited in Jennifer Green-Lewis, “‘Already the Past”: The Backward Glance of Victorian Photography.” English Language Notes 44, no. 2. (2006): 30.
4 Sontag, 3.
5 Timothy Mitchell quoted in Venda Louise Pollock, “Dislocated Narratives and Sites of Memory: Amateur Photographic Surveys in Britain 1889–1897.” Visual Culture in Britain 10, no. 1 (2009): 8.
6 Pollock, 4.
7 Sontag, 8.
8 Ibid., 5.
9 Pollock, 13.
10 Ibid., 19
11 Ibid.
12 Sontag, 9.
13 Ípek Türeli, “Ara Güler’s Photography of ‘Old Istanbul’ and Cosmopolitan Nostalgia” History of Photography 34, no. 3. (2010): 300.
14 Ibid., 312.
15 Green-Lewis, 39.
16 Pollock, 18.
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