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Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photographyand Urban ExperienceRosemary HawkerPublished online: 21 Aug 2013.
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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:
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.
342
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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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