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Page 1: Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience

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Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photographyand Urban ExperienceRosemary HawkerPublished online: 21 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Rosemary Hawker (2013) Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience,History of Photography, 37:3, 341-352, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2013.798521

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Page 2: Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience

Repopulating the Street:Contemporary Photography and

Urban Experience

Rosemary Hawker

Over the past thirty years, the city as represented by art photography has been shownas progressively empty and alienating. While the emptiness of nineteenth-centurystreets was due to the limitations of photographic technology, it was activelypursued as a formal device by the New Topographics photographers. Recent artphotography shows an even more pronounced trend towards showing the city asvacant. This contrasts starkly with the densely populated, bustling, urban environ-ments typical of twentieth-century street photography. This essay argues that imagesof an empty contemporary city can be understood as a symptom of disciplinaryrelations internal to photography as an art form, and as a consequence of artphotography’s distancing of itself from vernacular representations of the citywhen the distinction between art photography and vernacular photography is atrisk of collapsing. Empty urban images tell us about modes of experience in thecontemporary city and about photography itself. This essay uses the trope of thebanal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’ that typifies thecontemporary photographic discourse of the street. Philip-Lorca diCorcia andMelanie Manchot both address the everyday street as an acute site for understandingthe negotiation of public space and contemporary experiences of the city. Both referto yet go beyond the dichotomy of the city as empty or full and reveal a different setof relations to the street through photography.

Keywords: Paul Strand (1890–1976), Max Dupain (1911–1992), Jeff Wall (1946–),

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (1951–), Melanie Manchot (1966–), street photography, New

Topographics, everyday, banal, vernacular photography

Contemporary photographs of the city are often curiously empty and still, a condi-

tion made emphatic in Jeff Wall’s Dawn (figure 1).1 Such images work against the

more familiar image of a densely peopled and dynamic city that excited early

modernist photographers and that has informed the genre of street photography

ever since (figure 2). Today, much of the world has achieved a population density,

structure and organisation that was rare when modernists advertised the vibrancy of

urban experience. The myriad social networks of the city enable new ideas of

community and individual connectedness. Yet, over the last thirty years, the city as

represented by art photography andmost recently by prominent photographers such

as Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Greg Girard, Gabriel Orozco and

Laurenz Berges – the list is long and yet reductive – is shown as progressively vacant,

its streets empty of human activity and interaction.

No doubt there are multiple influences – many external to photography – that

have led to what I describe. One could learn much from studying the actual process

of urbanisation to understand the relations played out through this photographic

Email for correspondence:

[email protected]

1 – Wall’s work began as a photograph of

actors on a set but these figures were

removed.

History of Photography, Volume 37, Number 3, August 2013

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2013.798521

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

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trope. Nevertheless, this essay can only make a simpler argument – that the numbing

emptiness of the city as found in so many contemporary photographs can in part be

understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art

form and a popular cultural practice. These starkly depopulated urban settings are

the result of art photography distancing itself from vernacular representations of the

city that have thoroughly absorbed the language of art photography. The aesthetic of

the everyday, celebrating the work-a-day yet dramatic, busy and characterful city, as

it does particularly in street photography, has been so successful, so widely embraced

and repeated, as to become generic. Photography that claims the status of art does so

partly in its opposition to the vernacular, avoiding widely recognised formulas, in

pursuit of a more acute and aesthetically challenging form of the everyday. I refer to

this amplification of the everyday as ‘the banal’ but my use of the word ‘banal’ is not

Figure 1. Jeff Wall, Dawn, transparency in

lightbox, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2. Paul Strand, Fifth Avenue at 42nd

Street, New York, platinum print, 1915. #Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand

Archive.

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pejorative. Rather, it is an attempt to locate an extreme form of what is called ‘the

everyday’ in photographic discourse: a profound literalness that contemporary art

photography seems to pursue. To explore these issues is to understand why the city as

a subject for photography has become emptier and enervated while our cities are

increasingly populated, chaotic and, in many ways, more enabling than ever before.

In this way, these images and their relations tell us something of the discipline of

photography at the same time as they tell us about modes of experience and relations

with the world as represented in photography. Therefore, the emptiness identified in

the photography of urban banality is both a literal and a figural emptiness. It applies

to both the city that is represented and the photograph as emptied of style.

This essay will put some evidence to this claim through a loosely historical case

study of the photographic representation of the city that shows how our experience

and understanding of the urban environment have undergone this strange inversion.

I will then look to photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Melanie Manchot that

suggests new ways to encounter and interpret the city through photography and,

importantly, a way out of the impasse of the banal.

The city has always been a ready subject for photography, its accelerating change

coinciding with the mid-nineteenth-century invention of the medium. As such,

photography has played a constant role in understanding urban experience. Yet,

looking across photographic representations of the city from the nineteenth century

to today, we can see a strange binary inversion of the city as trope, where, broadly

speaking, the twentieth-century city is shown as densely populated and dynamic

while the twenty-first-century city is comparatively still and empty of people.

Steven Jacobs also identifies these extremes when he charts the representation of

the city as ‘void’ across photography’s history, doing so against a backdrop of more

familiar representations of the metropolis of chaotic diversity.2 Jacobs identifies the

limits of technology as responsible for the emptiness of early urban photographs,

where long exposures erased the bustling activity from the streets of nineteenth-

century Paris:

At a time when artists and writers were starting to define themodernmetropolisas a place of hurried activity and fleeting impressions, photography reduced thesame scene to a panorama of motionless, lifeless objects. Because people arecompletely absent or reduced to the shadowy form of blurred ‘ghosts’, the urbanlandscapes recorded in early photographs were often described as ‘cities of thedead’.3

Rapidly changing photographic technology saw exposure times shrink from hours to

minutes and to fractions of a second by the turn of the twentieth century. With

smaller cameras and shorter exposures, street photography quickly developed into a

genre based on spontaneity and celebrating the activity and excitement of the city.

Yet, as Jacobs details, in a wide variety of photographs across the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, and in examples from literature and architecture, streets

remained empty in order that the city might be construed as a site of isolation and

alienation or as architectonic andmonumental. Jacobs concludes his discussion with

reference to photographs from the 1960s to the present, arguing for their thoroughly

established ‘post-urban emptiness’.4 Returning to the technology and discipline of

photography, he notes the further entrenchment of emptiness by such topographic

photographers as Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz and continued today by,

among others, Wall and Gursky. He describes the move away from the spontaneous

snapshot aesthetic of street photography and towards the physical and emotional

reserve of large-format cameras, concluding: ‘The urban void no longer expresses a

sublime horror or loneliness and alienation. Emptiness has become everyday and

banal’.5

Jacobs’s thorough account of the various symbolic and aesthetic uses of the city

as void implies a fairly even-handed oscillation between the two opposed tropes of

the city – as dense and dynamic or as empty and still – across most of the history of

2 – Steven Jacobs, ‘Amor Vacui: Photography

and the Image of the Empty City’, History of

Photography, 30:2 (2006), 108–18.

3 – Ibid., 108.

4 – Ibid., 118.

5 – Ibid.

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photography. I argue for a stronger distinction between the photographs of the

twentieth-century and twenty-first-century city, where the history of photography

and developments in photographic technology intersect in the representation of

experience in surprising ways.

While exceptions in both categories of image are easily found, from the turn of the

nineteenth century onwards photography characterised the city as peopled and purpo-

seful. Photographers such as Paul Strand, Walker Evans and Robert Frank clearly

celebrate the city’s density, industry and activity. Their photographs show people

traversing urban space, their multiple unknowable agendas briefly intersecting, their

diverse trajectories underlining the dynamism of the city as a place of purposeful

activity. Strand uses heightened viewpoints to emphasise the proximity of bodies and

their convergence, while Evans’s and Frank’s grounded views amplify the compressed

space of the crowded street and the indirect looking and seeing that enables people to

find a path through the throng. Throughout the twentieth century, modernist photo-

graphers carried this theme still further, making the sense of the city as a complex

organism all the more apparent. Even when this tipped over into incoherence, the city

remained dynamic – a place of endless and diverse possibility. This is variously com-

municated through the press of bodies in the street, chance encounters, crowded cafes,

and traffic, all set against the dense urban grid, multi-storied buildings, and industrial

structures. This was the case whether the city was New York, Paris or Sydney, as

demonstrated in examples from such diverse photographers as Robert Doisneau,

Alexander Rodchenko and Max Dupain (figure 3). Even when the city was the back-

drop to solitary moments that might signal exceptions to this trope, these examples

often communicate a sense of having this remarkable place to oneself, of going places

and doing things within its enabling infrastructure, rather than of being alone or

alienated in an indifferent environment. While the examples from Surrealism that

Figure 3. Max Dupain, Rush Hour, Kings

Cross, gelatin silver print, 1938. # The

Max Dupain Exhibition Negative Archive.

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Jacobs identifies clearly resist the prevailing aesthetic, by casting the city as alienating

and otherworldly their resistance demonstrates the strength of the mainstream mod-

ernist response and its familiarity.

As a subject for photography, the city has been theorised in many ways, most

famously through Walter Benjamin’s claim that new media collapsed the distance

between lived experience and art.6 This topic is also addressed through urban and

architectural theory. Parallels with the empty city are found in the concept of the ‘city

as void’ (as described by writers such as Bernardo Secchi,7 echoed by Jacobs and seen

in photographs by Struth and Gabriele Basilico), and in the concept of ‘terrain vague’

(as described by Ignasi Sola-Morales and often addressed by Wall’s photographs).8

While we can continue to discuss everyday experience through these images and

ideas, the nature of this experience seems radically recast, and recast in a way that

runs counter to the simple logic of population densities and urban infrastructures.

So, how can we understand this shift away from the dynamism of the twentieth-

century city?

The move towards the emptiness and anonymity of the contemporary city owes

much to the enormous influence of American conceptual artist Ed Ruscha and, in

turn, New Topographers such as Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and Bernd and Hilla

Becher.9 Their work rejected the Romantic inflection of modernism in favour of a

supposedly detached and styleless treatment of the built environment. The present

discussion aims to understand how contemporary examples build on and differ from

what was begun in the 1970s by those photographers and others.

One way to evidence changing attitudes to the city is to look more closely at the

history of street photography. The twentieth-century photographic canon includes

countless photographers working, at least in part, in this genre. Some have already

been mentioned, such as Strand, Evans and Frank, but also Harry Callahan and Lee

Friedlander are representative photographers.10 While today street photography is

still part of photographic practice, it is hard to think of photographers of Wall’s

stature who work in this mode. One reason for this is that the genre has become so

thoroughly the purview of the amateur enthusiast, the commercial or the ethno-

graphic photographer, as distinct from the art photographer (although as always

there are exceptions, such as diCorcia or Beat Streuli). Photo-sharing sites and blogs

proliferate the genre and its expression of the direct experience of the city as

addressed in self-conscious artfulness. This array of images is in many senses diverse

and captivating, and in others generic and predictable, for the most part repeating

familiar visual formulas learnt from modernism.

The assimilation of modernist culture and technique into everyday image-

making is seen across many forms of photography, but is pronounced in the

representation of urban experience. That the style of art photography has been

thoroughly absorbed in vernacular expression is evident on FlickR and in blog

references, both visual and written, to photographers such as Struth, Gursky or

Wall. These sorts of examples are important because, as Craig Owens argues, the

vernacular determines what art photography is not.11 If Owens is correct, it follows

that when art photography’s modes become so apparent that they are seen in

popular, commercial and amateur photography, it is proof of their conceptual and

aesthetic exhaustion for art. Whatever their original merit or, one might even say,

truth, they have become cliche�s and for the present are unusable. They may remain

potent, even as they continue to circulate, but their self-evidence and repeatability

mean they are outside the autogenesis and inimitability that defines art in the

aesthetic era. Benjamin locates just such an outcome in the early industrialisation

of photography in a photographic practice he describes as arty journalism, peddling

the consolation that ‘the world is beautiful’.12

So the familiarity of this address to ‘the everyday’ that we see in this photography

means it has become a genre based in a predictable transformation of the ordinary

into the extraordinary. We can see the origins of this effect in modernist photo-

graphy where someone like Strand shows the walk to work as monumental and

6 –Walter Benjamin, ‘TheWork of Art in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.

Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New

York: Schocken Books 1985, 217–51. This is

also the case for the impact of broader

theories of the everyday and culture. While

there is no room to account for the

complexity and breadth of this discussion

here, Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes,

Maurice Blanchot and Michel de Certeau are

most often identified with these theories and

their impact upon contemporary debates.

7 – Bernardo Secchi, ‘The Abandoned

Territory’, Casabella, 49:512, 513, 514

(1985): 18–19, 12–13 and 14–15.

8 – Ignasi Sola-Morales, ‘Terrain Vague’, in

Anyplace, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1995, 118–23.

9 – William Jenkins, New Topographics:

Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,

Exhibition Catalogue, Rochester, NY:

International Museum of Photography at

George Eastman House 1975. See also Alison

Nordstrom and Britt Salvesen, New

Topographics, Tuczon, AZ: Center for

Creative Photography, University of Arizona

and Rochester, NY: George Eastman House

International Museum of Photography and

Film 2009. The latter is the catalogue for a

travelling exhibition that restaged the

original New Topographics exhibition and

examined the lineage of the New

Topographers from 1975.

10 – Jacobs identifies the 1960s shift to

topographic photography as being a move

away from street photography. Jacobs, ‘Amor

Vacui’, 108.

11 – Craig Owens, ‘Detachment, from the

Parergon’, October, 9 (Summer 1979), 49,

cited in Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea:

Writing, Photography, History, Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press 2001, 58.

12 – Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of

Photography’ (1931), in Selected Writings,

Volume 2 (1927–1934), ed. Michael

W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press

of Harvard University Press 1999, 526.

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symbolic, or where, for Frank, the crush and rush of the city is exhilarating. This

drama all too easily becomes conventional when it merely exercises the opposition

between the everyday and the spectacular, transforming one into the other. The

photograph as transformative or illuminating has been widely celebrated. For exam-

ple, John Szarkowski writes:

on the evidence of Thomas Roma’s pictures – the light comes down with suchsweet sympathy that asphalt shingles and cyclone fences are shown to be as fineas marble, and [. . .] the weeds in vacant lots make us think of Eden.13

This too easy transformation and the overblown and overfamiliar rhetoric for which

it has become an occasion is what contemporary photographers who pursue the

banal eschew.

For contemporary photography to mark out an aesthetic domain appropriate to

art, it needs to avoid the photographic codes of transformation that have been so

thoroughly identified through the widespread use of photography, through the very

repetition and reproduction that the medium is predicated upon. In the context of

the contemporary representation of the city, art photography exceeds popular

photographic culture through a literalness that goes beyond the transcription of

the everyday to identify objects and scenes through the most direct means. When we

remember that the banal is about the repetition of the already known and entirely

apparent, these photographs make no claim to revelation or transformation or

artfulness. As such, they distance themselves from the vernacular. Therefore, what

is at stake here is not just the subjects being everyday and obvious and the points of

view familiar, but rather an emptying out of the forms of photographic art as they

have developed over the medium’s history.

While much has been written about the everyday as an aesthetic, there is

relatively little on the banal. One exception is an essay by Eugenie Shinkle that clearly

identifies the banal as an aesthetic in contemporary photography.14 Shinkle describes

the banal as being unconcerned with the transformation of its subjects and under-

stands banality as grounded in a temporal condition – the indecisive moment, the

opposite of a famous cliche� of photographic art, and, as such, indebted to vernacular

photography. Shinkle also emphasises the banal’s resistance to emotional and critical

engagement, and although this is where the banal begins, it is finally counter to a

productive quality of banality. Shinkle considers vernacular photography as unre-

flective and unconventionalised, whereas this essay argues that the uptake of the

motifs of art photography in the vernacular is at the heart of the current turn to

banality.

When the New Topographers became more documentary than the modernists,

who had earlier insisted on being more documentary than the pictorialists, they both

also pursued decreasing degrees of style. So it is with the anti-aesthetic practised by

high-art photographers of today. In making starkly ordinary images, photographers

turn all the more insistently away from illusion and its familiar conventions towards

the most direct, literal factuality available through photography. Paradoxically, this

effect is just as likely to be achieved through the meticulously staged and constructed

image as through the refusal of mediation and manipulation that has characterised

most documentary modes of photography.

An insistent control over the human figure is common to many contemporary

photographs of the city. Struth photographs in the early morning so as to have empty

streets and still construction sites. Wall directs actors into place and later digitally

erases them. Without wanting to collapse distinctions between these images, it is

clear that the city as represented in these scenarios is a problematic place. Although

individual works might open to a range of interpretations, these photographers of

recent decades make a city that is, at the very least, in a state of suspension, and at

worst hostile and disabling. This sense of agoraphobia, identified by Jacobs,15 is

entirely contrary to the vibrant city of much of the twentieth century. Yet cities today,

in other contexts, are recognised as genuinely enabling in ways that they only

13 – John Szarkowski, cited in Thomas

Roma, Found in Brooklyn, New York:

W. W. Norton 1996, back bookcover.

14 – Eugenie Shinkle, ‘Boredom, Repetition,

Inertia: Contemporary Photography and the

Aesthetics of the Banal’, Mosaic, 37:4

(December 2004), 165–84.

15 – Donna Brett also discusses this

agoraphobia in the context of post-war

German photography. Donna Brett, ‘The

Uncanny Return: Documenting Place in

Post-war German Photography’,

Photographies, 3:1 (March 2010), 7–22.

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promised to be in the early twentieth century. However, this is not apparent from

contemporary art photography. Having emptied the city of its inhabitants, it seems

the only way for photography to reintroduce them is as actors on a set – as Wall has

done in works such as A View From a Nightclub (2004–2005).

In understanding this paradox and its historicity, it is also useful to examine the

work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Melanie Manchot. Their photographs of the city

address urban experience and the medium of photography through different visual

articulations of the roles and abilities of photography across its history. While both

diCorcia and Manchot can be said to be ‘street photographers’, they understand the

address to their subject not as an aesthetic form or genre so much as a task or topos.

For both photographers, the means to this is technology and the resuscitation of

earlier modes of address to their subject matter. At the same time, they elide the too

familiar aesthetic of street photography as a genre. The photographs that result could

not be more different.

While diCorcia and Manchot also photograph the figure on the street in highly

mediated ways, there is something very different at stake for our understanding and

experience of the city in their photographs. Both address the relationship between

the individual and the mass and the negotiation of public space that reveals some-

thing of an interior private life. Both make photographs that represent their subjects

in a way which is neither spontaneous and unself-conscious nor staged. The subject

comes into these photographs in distinctly different manners, but it is a ‘coming into’

that is an insight into urban life and a fresh angle on the disciplinary history of art

photography. Their work moves us on from the antimony of the fullness or empti-

ness of the city and from the impasse between vernacular and art photography that is

expressed in the banal.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

diCorcia’s street photography of the last twenty years makes a bridge between

modernism and contemporary shifts in the genre. His Streetworks series from the

1990s has strong connections back to the movement and energy of the densely

populated modernist city where individuals’ paths intersect and diverge as they

cross the public space (figure 4). His more recent street-based works, as seen in his

series Heads, represent a stark departure from this approach (figure 5). In these

works, we find historical continuity with the photography that has shown the street

and its activity since the medium’s invention, but this is developed beyond the binary

opposition of emptiness and fullness. diCorcia describes his earlier work when he

states: ‘I was challenging what was happening in photography. A lot of that has been

absorbed to the point where it is a cliche�’16 – but he could make the same claim,

perhaps even more strongly, for these recent works.

These photographs are taken in the street from an obscured, scaffolded vantage

point using zoom lenses, multiple flashes and remote triggers. They are candid

photographs made without their subject’s knowledge or consent as they move within

the range of the photographer’s sophisticated technology. Their subjects are largely

or completely isolated from the details of the street and the other bodies around them

by the aggressive light of the flash. The city itself recedes into darkness, as if erased

(figure 6). The space of the street is so compressed by this approach that the figure

seems to be pressed up against the picture plane, exposed and yet hermetically

introspective. While these images are made in densely peopled urban space, they

concentrate on the individuals in the crowd in such a way as to amplify their

individuality, their living an interior and private life in a public space, even when

caught in diCorcia’s interrogatory flash-lit exposure. Their faces register the emotion

or lack thereof involved in negotiating an urban experience that we cannot see.

In his essay ‘Little History of Photography’, Benjamin described early photo-

graphy as causing the subject to ‘focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on

past it; during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject (as it were) grew

16 – Philip-Lorca diCorcia in an interview

with Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh,

‘Attentive Contradictions: The Photographic

World of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’, Border

Crossings, 108 (November 2008), 32.

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into the picture in the sharpest contrast with appearances in a snapshot’.17 This

temporal experience of photography inscribes the subject into the image, their

appearance becoming more dense and certain with the duration of the exposure

and their self-conscious being in the moment. The becoming of the image is also the

becoming of the subject. This durational experience of photography is in consider-

able contrast to the brevity of diCorcia’s exposures, yet his photographs locate the

intersection of the subject in the moment as acutely as Benjamin claims for early

photography. diCorcia’s photographs see their subjects enter the picture as if

through a suddenly opened door, their presence and precise subjectivity delivered

as a sure and palpable shock of apprehension.

While these photographs present a curious mix of the formal portrait and the

snapshot, their high-end technology means they depict people in the street in a way

Figure 4. Philip-Lorca diCorcia, ‘Hong

Kong’, Streetwork, 1993–1997, Ektacolor

print, 1996. Courtesy of the artist and David

Zwirner, New York/London.

Figure 5. Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Head #23,

Fujicolor Crystal Archive Print, 2001.

Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner,

New York/London.

17 – Benjamin, ‘Little History of

Photography’, 514.

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never before possible. We might expect startled faces responding to the sudden light

of the flash, but the speed of the camera and its pairing with the flash mean we see

them in the tiny fraction of a second before this can occur. For the most part, we see

faces that are unself-conscious, lost in the reserve of their public-shaped appearance

as presented to the street. That these photographs are voyeuristic seems clear, yet at

odds with the fact of their being taken in public where their subjects make themselves

visible and observable. We see something so personal here that it is at once dis-

comforting and compelling and curiously reminiscent of responses to Daguerre’s

first photographic portraits:

We didn’t trust ourselves at first, to look long at the first pictures he developed,we were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed thatthe little tiny faces in the picture could see us, so powerfully was everyoneeffected by the unaccustomed clarity and unaccustomed fidelity to nature of thefirst daguerreotypes.18

So it is again with diCorcia’s Heads. That it is still possible for developments in

camera technology to make us abashed in our looking is a remarkable fact that links

us to the history of the medium and its strongest effects.

Benjamin’s observation of photography in the 1930s also still holds true: ‘The

camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret

images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms of the beholder’.19

There can be no doubt that diCorcia’s photographs are powerful and revelatory

images which are immediate and arresting. Since Benjamin wrote, cameras have

become still smaller and more portable, but it is the speed and accuracy of diCorcia’s

large-format photography that delivers the shock of these secret images. The tech-

nical apparatus with which they are made and their startling effects take them well

beyond the purview of vernacular street photography and out of an aesthetic of the

banal into a new register of the city and our experience of it.

Melanie Manchot

Manchot has made a number of series of works in the street, many of which make an

even more direct connection to the history of street photography than diCorcia’s.

Manchot addresses the negotiation of relationships between the public and private

Figure 6. Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Head #10,

Fujicolor Crystal Archive Print, 2000.

Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner,

New York/London.

18 – Karl Dauthendey, cited in Benjamin

‘Little History of Photography’, 512.

19 – Benjamin, ‘Little History of

Photography’, 527.

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through what she describes as the performative elements of photography and

portraiture.20 In contrast to diCorcia, Manchot’s street portraits are made with the

knowledge and consent of her subjects. I will restrict myself to just three examples:

Groups and Locations, photographed in Moscow in 2004 (figure 7); Neighbours,

Berlin from 2005 (figure 8); and Celebration (Cyprus Street) (figure 9), a video and

photographic work made in London’s East End between 2009 and 2010.

In Celebration (Cyprus Street), a two-part project for Whitechapel Gallery,

Manchot examines the traditions of group portraiture in conjunction with the street

parties that were common in post-war East London. The first part of the project was

an exhibition on the history of the street group portrait. This was followed by the

Cyprus Street party itself, organised and filmed by Manchot. She also took a series of

still portraits of members of that community.

Neighbours is a series triggered by a set of postcards that Manchot found in a

thrift shop in Berlin. Each postcard shows a Berlin street scene with an exact address.

Manchot returned to those addresses and photographed what she found there, when

Figure 7. Melanie Manchot, Groups and

Locations (Moscow), Cathedral of Christ Saint

Saviour, 6.23pm, 2004, C-type photograph,

2004. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 8. Melanie Manchot, Linienstrasse,

Berlin Mitte, Neighbours, Berlin, C-type

photograph, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

20 – Melanie Manchot and John Slyce, ‘An

ElongatedMoment: A Conversation between

Melanie Manchot and John Slyce’, in

Melanie Manchot: Moscow Girls, ed. Katja

Blomberg, Berlin: Haus am Waldsee 2006,

n.p.

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possible asking the occupants of the building to pose for her in a group street

portrait.

Groups and Locations is a series of photographs taken in public places in

Moscow. In Russia, it is illegal to photograph groups in public, and Manchot

achieved these images by setting up her camera on a tripod and asking people in

the vicinity to stop and turn towards her camera on a signal. In this way, the subjects

were not just aware and consensual of Manchot’s photography, but engaged in a

group resistance against authority. The police were quick to stop Manchot, but,

being without Russian, she feigned ignorance, packed up and moved onto another

location. These figures, widely ranged across the public space, may seem strange and

awkward, but this also connects to Russian law that forbids group demonstration but

allows individual demonstration, defined by a separation of approximately 30 feet.21

For all its seeming otherworldliness, Manchot’s photographs of curiously dispersed

figures can also be understood to document an aspect of street life in Russia.

Each series achieves something different for the subjects’ negotiation of the city.

Sometimes this is political, sometimes historic, sometimes a combination of the two.

In all cases, Manchot, even more visibly than diCorcia, marks out a set of relations

between the figure and the street and reveals something of what the context of the

street brings to our understanding of the person. Her posing of subjects is highly

mediated and yet the relations she refers to through this process are extraordinarily

direct and revealing of individualised experiences of the city. Manchot’s subjects in

Moscow are staged in their response to the camera, but the photographs that result

are documents of their relationship to place and state. The photographs of Berlin are

portraits of the city itself, its streets and people, made all the more so by their

historical stretch, the shaping of the city and its people across time. Celebration

(Cyprus Street) sees the people of the East End drawn back into the street by a

community and context made possible and apparent through photography, video

and the art gallery.

Manchot’s group portraits are some of the most successful and innovative

examples of how photography might articulate new meanings of the city, how it

might move beyond the impasse of the everyday and the banal. The strength of these

images lies in their resurrection of historical modes of photographic representation

based in community and the celebration and/or solemnisation of its gatherings. The

turn to address the camera, while occupying the public place, directly acknowledges

the street, and by implication the city, as a space of negotiation.

Figure 9. Melanie Manchot, Celebration

(Cyprus Street), C-type photograph, 2010.

Courtesy of the artist.

21 – Andrew E. Kramer, ‘In Russia, Dissent

Turns Into a Solo Act’, New York Times (6

January 2011), A13.

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Conclusion

Contemporary photography arrived at the banal through playing out aspects of its

history and disciplinary formation that see art photography attempt to distance itself

from the success of street photography in the vernacular. diCorcia andManchot help

to inform us retrospectively about what has happened in the photographic repre-

sentation of the city that both reveals and shapes our urban experience. Their work

provides a means to think about the history of street photography and its dichot-

omous formation of the city as empty or full, the disciplinary formations of photo-

graphy in the vernacular or art photography, and about the street as an acute site of

urban experience. In diCorcia’s and Manchot’s photographs we see a common

knowledge of a common experience, articulated through one of the most enduring

and vernacular genres of photography and yet revealing new understandings of that

experience. Their engagement with figures on the street could not be more different,

yet each offers a solution to the problem that the everyday city has become for

photographers – one that simultaneously acknowledges the complex history of its

subjects, both the city and photography.

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