Urban Encounters: Photography, Ethnography & the City, 2008

Goldsmiths, University of London
16 & 17 May, 2008

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Keynote:
Liam Kennedy, University College Dublin

‘American Ruins’

This presentation will spotlight the work of the photographer Camilo Jose Vergara who has created an extensive body of documentary photography focused on the ruined landscapes of deindustrialised American cities. Vergara’s ambitious project aims to produce a comprehensive coverage of urban transformation that can promote social change and act as an archive of public memory. As such it illustrates and reanimates the tensions between moral outrage and slumming spectacle that have historically shadowed the treatment of urban poverty in American documentary photography. It also draws attention to the uncertain and uncanny significations of ‘ruin’ in the American imagination, particularly in the apprehension of generative relations between race and urban decline.

Panel 1: Urban landscapes: Mapping memories

This session will explore the cultural geographies of landscape in relation to photographic theory and practice. The presentations will focus on the changing nature of landscape photography, both as a spatial and cultural practice. Key questions addressed are:

  • How does landscape photography produce knowledge of space and ethnographies of place?
  • To what extent is landscape photography being redefined by the theoretical contributions of archaeology and geography?
  • How might an urban landscape practice rethink itself in relation to cultural sociology?
  • What role does the urban landscape play as counterpoint to the landscape of the suburban?

Paul Goodwin, Tate Britain
‘Peckham Rising: Re-framing blackness in the urban landscape’
This presentation will consider my own ‘urban encounter’ with photography and urbanism by presenting a case study of Peckham Rising an exhibition of photography, sound and text I curated at the Sassoon Gallery in Peckham in September 2007. After considering the relationship between ‘blackness’ and the urban landscape the presentation will outline the main curatorial premises of the exhibition and review some of the key images in relation to debates about the socio-spatial restructuring of Peckham and the positioning of black communities within prevailing representations of urban regeneration. The main focus will be on how the exhibition attempted, within the context of an encounter between critical writing and photography, to critique and deconstruct reductionist images of Peckham both in media and policy discourses and tease out alternative ‘post-ghetto’ and ‘dissident’ readings of blackness in the urban landscape.

Ingrid Pollard, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Belonging in Britain’
The imaginary beginning represented by the celebratory image of the Empire Windrus in 1948 as Gilroy says shows ‘the excitement and enthusiasm of innocence well dressed travellers bearing to many pieces of luggage’; has become familiar in the discourse of 1950’s migration to London. The long slow process of arrival and integration into the mainstream culture by the migrant settlers is the basis of this work in progress. I arrived in London as a child in the wintry 1950’s, one year after my father left Georgetown, Guyana for London, and six months after my mother. I am now considerably older than either of my parents were when they set out on their great adventures to London. My father’s letters speak of his aspirations, hopes and intentions. His excitement at being in the metropolitan city; places to go, sights to see, hanging out with West Indian friends, jobs, the practicalities of glove wearing, fog, and new dwellings.

Gregor Stephan
‘Five Seconds Later’ (2007 – 2008)
The body of work “Five Seconds Later” is an exploration of the visual in relation to time and process in urban photography. By deploying primarily analogue photography Stephan is engaged in experimentation at the borderline of visibility. Five seconds exposure time – with an open aperture – turns buildings and inhabitants into a black negative. Through high resolution scan technology a fading, grainy and scratchy, sometimes colourful and foggy urban texture becomes visible. The following questions will be addressed in his presentation:
• What happens to such concepts as the decisive moment when its controlling element is put into question by a visual outcome which is only partially accessible?
• What happens to our imagination and our ways of mapping memories when the relation between the photographic image and its objects tends to collapse due to an extended encounter of the negative with natural light and its technological reset?
The visual is less about what the speed of photographic technology allows to freeze and control in a decisive moment but more about what becomes visible in its relation to memory and imagination within an urban environment which often only acknowledges movement and mobility.

Susan Schwartzenberg, The Exploratorium
‘Embodied Landscapes’
Landscapes of the built or natural environment are defined by human identity; use patterns over time, and ownership. By surveying a series of photographic projects this talk will explore the ways human consciousness is embedded in the landscape and the need for visual strategies/cartographies that could express the tension between the historical and psychological – often manifested in changing relationships to place.

Panel 2: Architecture and Photography

This session will focus on the relationship between architectural theory and photographic practice. We will look at how architectural photographers negotiate the complex task of producing meaningful images about urban architectural space, and how collective experiences and lives are visually evoked within such spaces. Key questions addressed are:

  • How do narratives of community coalesce with architectural space?
  • How might interior architecture manifest itself within a visual arts context?
  • Beyond buildings: is architectural photography just about the materiality of buildings?
  • What role do architectural photography archives play in understanding the multiple pasts of a city?
  • How do we understand architectural photography in the context of built spaces vs. found spaces?

Michael Keith and Alison Rooke, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Narrating street urbanisms and the spatial sublime’
In this presentation Michael Keith and Alison Rooke introduce some early material from the ‘Signs of the City’ project (in which CUCR is a partner) to consider the manner in which identity and the neighbourhood are narrated in a project that uses photographic representation to work with young people in Barcelona, Berlin, Sofia and London. The talk explores the manner in which cultural praxis disrupts the homely narratives of the built form in the diasporic cities of European multiculture.

Rosy Martin
‘Too close to home? – an exploration of a specific semi-detached suburban house’
A close-up investigation of the interior of a specific house, Martin’s mother’s home for over 70 years, offers glances at a fragment of working-class suburban social history, as if held in aspic. This is a vernacular architectural photography which is linked to place as a theatre of memories and an exploration of the poetics of space. The images isolate fragments from the everyday and map the traces of ‘absent presence’. The camera’s eye clings tenderly to every worn surface of the interior decorations, furnishings and paintings created by the artist’s father, since the early thirties. The work presents a gaze which is tender both as an old wound, and as a comforting embrace cut with impending loss. Like a palimpsest, layers of small changes subtly represent adaptations over time. Mapping the wear and tear on the house, the objects within it, and the mother’s body, the images explore and isolate tiny details and fragments, from which the viewer slowly builds up a sense of the whole space. Working on the personal, the marginal, the ordinary, everyday touches both private and public memories. Photography offers this opportunity, to confront in isolation elements of lived experience, made strange by their sudden removal from the continuum of day-to-day living, stilled.

Isidro Ramirez, Havering College and Kingston University
‘Photography, Fantasy and Daydream’
I will show work from my latest project – Photography, Fantasy and Daydream. This project is divided into three parts: What We Don’t See 2005-06; Four Corners 2007 and Almost 2007-08. The questions I will try to answer are related to point 2 ‘How might interior architecture manifest itself within a visual arts context?’ And point 3 ‘Beyond buildings: is architectural photography just about the materiality of buildings?’ While contextualising my practice around theories of representation, phenomenology, imagination and spectatorship I will try to challenge the traditional roles photography is usually constrained by, in particular its historically inherited, indexical attributes. I will argue that as photography is liberated from the limitations of the real a whole new set of untapped issues is open for exploration. Thus I will propose photography has great potential in unravelling new ways of representing and interpreting architectural spaces.

Gary Van Zante, MIT Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
‘Reconstructing New Orleans: Theodore Lilienthal’s Photographic Campaign for the Paris World Exposition of 1867’
This paper discusses a municipally-sponsored photographic survey of New Orleans exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1867. Executed by photographer Theodore Lilienthal (1829-94), the campaign produced 150 large-plate views of the city two years after the end of the Civil War. New Orleans had been one of America’s fastest-growing and wealthiest cities, and the continent’s second port, but war and occupation shattered its commercial supremacy. City boosters conceived of the campaign as a publicity tool to revitalize overseas trade and attract European immigration and investment. To this end, Lilienthal pictured a vigorous port city of commerce and culture undiminished by war. Lilienthal’s Reconstruction campaign is presented as the first use of photography for municipally-sponsored civic boosterism in America. The production, exhibition and reception of the photographs are discussed, and the rhetorical strategy of the campaign is examined. Some observations are offered on the relationship between nineteenth-century city-building and photography.

Panel 3: Urban portraiture and identities

This session will focus on the challenges of portraiture within the urban domain. Through a discussion of the psychologies and sociologies of self, the panellists will delineate key themes within a theory of photographic portraiture. The session will explore portraiture as a mediated practice concerned with the active construction of identities and will address the following key questions:

  • What role does psychological and psychoanalytic theory play within an understanding of portrait photography?
  • Is there a ‘sociology of portraiture’, and in what ways might this be framed?
  • What is the relationship between self and environment?
  • If the ‘essential self’ is dead, what remains?
  • How does photography explore the street as the site where identities are tried on and tried out?

Melanie Manchot
‘Groups + Locations’
My presentation will focus on discussing the photographic series ‘Groups + Locations (Moscow), 2004, which explores ideas regarding street photography and contemporary urban culture. The work builds on two concerns central to my practice: One is the performative quality of photography and portrait photography in particular; the other is an ongoing investigation into our understanding of and participation in the realms of the public and the private. The series references and is based on Russian photographs from the late 19th century, and combines them with observations about restrictions on the use of public space and suspicion towards photography in contemporary Russia. The work aims to investigate how gestures and situations can become temporary interventions that have the ability to charge public space.

Daniel Meadows, Cardiff University
‘The Free Photographic Omnibus’
Daniel Meadows’ portraits on the streets of England made from his Free Photographic Omnibus in 1973 & ‘74 have been much celebrated in recent years. Reviewing them last May at Tate Britain for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, novelist Esther Freud said: “It was incredibly moving… and, at the time after he’d done it, no one felt that they were particularly interesting or strange enough but now, looking at them, they’re fascinating and they are certainly strange.” For Daniel, though, this work was only a beginning. Revisiting many of those he had photographed twenty-five years after the event, Meadows was struck by the intensity of the personal engagement people had with those old pictures. These encounters set him off on a new journey during which he discovered a different way of doing documentary; this time by enabling people to make short, personal movies for themselves. As the cultural studies commentator John Hartley has written, Meadows’ real journey has been one of ‘observational truthfulness’. Meadows’ talk will be illustrated with projections of both photographs and short movies.

Othello de Souza
Following an introduction of my work, I will discuss the process of how I photograph in terms of what I look for when executing a photograph and how I relate to my subjects. I will outline the recent projects I have undertaken, including gallery commissions and commercial work. Recent commissions have come from The National Portrait Gallery, Platform for Art, Camden Arts Centre, Orleans House Gallery and The National Trust. My creative influences range from everyday experiences to the Italian Renaissance.

Panel 4: Street Photography

In this session we will focus on recent developments within street photography, particularly with reference to its re-emergence as an important part of fine art and gallery practice. Panellists will discuss the historical context of street photography, and why both a theoretical and practical reconsideration of the genre has led to such a renaissance of diverse forms in recent years. Key questions addressed are:

  • What is the relationship between street photography and the social history of the city?
  • What are the ethical and legal constraints faced by street photographers within London?
  • Why has there been such a significant upsurge in street photography practice in recent years?
  • What role does street photography play within a visual history of the city?
  • What is the relationship between street photography and the everyday?

Paul Lowe, London College of Communication
Paul Lowe will talk about his ongoing project in Israel and the Occupied Territories, looking as the fragmentation of Palestinian East Jerusalem from its hinterland in the West bank. Israeli policies of ’self defense’ and the expansion of settlements have led to the de facto separation of Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territories, as exemplified by the ‘Security barrier’, an 8m-high wall that snakes across the landscape, and by the over 500 checkpoints that litter the roads throughout the West bank, making travel extremely complex. Visually, the project seeks to challenge preconceptions that the only narrative Palestinians can enact is that of violence and conflict, by focusing on daily life in the streets, cafes, restaurants, shops and homes on Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Paul Reas, University of Wales Newport
Paul Reas will talk about his new series of work, street photography made in and around London and featured in the current issue of Photoworks Magazine. Some of this work is a part of a commission from L.C.C and Southwark Council. Paul’s is the first of ten commissions, over a ten-year period, looking at the impact of the imminent re-development of the Elephant and Castle in southeast London.
Paul will be talking about this new work in relation to his previous work and within the context of what might be loosely described as ‘community photography’ and the working class experience. The talk will pay particular attention to the photographic representation of working class culture.

Kirsten Campbell, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Thresholds of the Visible’
This paper explores the relationship between the visible and the evidential. The concern of the paper is not the traditional problem of the evidential status of the image, but rather the legal relationship between the visible and the evidential. Comparing the legal and photographic gaze, the paper explores how the criminal act becomes visible in the international criminal trial.

Paul Halliday, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘In the Moment/of the Moment: Street Photography and Emergence’
Drawing on my photographic work around the streets and public places of London, this paper will focus on the tension between planned visualisations of the city, and the embracing of randomness as a form of working methodology. I will examine how a qualitative cultural sociology might speak to, and enter into a meaningful dialogue with the unplanned and serendipitous journeys often undertaken by street photographers in search of images that aim to evocate an experience of the city as ephemeral, contested and fluid. What is the relationship between street photography and ethnographic poetics? How does it feel to be ‘in the moment’ and in what way might such experiences shape the creative emergence of the visual narrative?

Helen Liggett, Cleveland State University
‘Staying Connected: Street Photography and the Excess of Fact’
Many people don’t occupy the streets in what we think of as traditional ways. They may be at home on line or out in private on cell phones or visiting “friends” on My Space pages. However “staying connected” is not radically new so much as an iteration of ongoing concerns about the relationships between portraying the city and living in it. Images abide as a ubiquitous component of urban life. This paper introduces a conceptual scheme for exploring how street photography engages its time as an ongoing process — Not as the photograph to be interpreted, but as a number of photographic occasions to be asserted, constructed, and inhabited. It is a brief attempt to consider photographic images of urban life in relationship to processes that construct that life and finally, to consider what it means to be responsible for an image.

Panel 5: Visual ethnographies & the urban encounter

This session will address the central question of whether urban photography might be thought of as a form of visual ethnography. The panellists will debate the changing nature of urban visual practice set against a blurring of the boundaries between visual practice and research-based urban sociology. Key questions addressed are:

  • What does urban photography tell us about the social world and how does this constitute a form of knowledge?
  • Many visual artists have, and increasingly are, locating their practices within a discussion of the ethnographic poetics of their work. Is this wishful thinking, or does it point towards a conceptual shift?
  • Is an urban photographer a sociologist with a camera?
  • How does urban photographic work explore the layered identities and memories of a place?

Gabrielle Bendiner–Viani, The Graduate Center, CUNY & the New School
‘Guided Tours: Photographs and Dialogue in two American Cities’
My work excavates the everyday in two complex heterogeneous urban neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York and Oakland, California, exploring both the nature of everyday experience and the nature of representation. The project centers on the stories neighborhood residents tell as they guide me through their neighborhoods and the photographs I make to document these “tours,” which I then share with residents. Photographing neighborhood places has been a way for me to bring residents’ worlds back to them, asking them to consider their own places in a new way, asking them to challenge what Barthes has called the “counter-memory” of photography. Positing that photographic representation can shift the way we think about place and the everyday, the project uses photography to stage points of disjunction that make the process of the everyday more visible. With these photographs, people look again at their familiar places, and so unearth with me some of the negotiations involved in building everyday place.

Simon Rowe and Ben Gidley, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Pepys Portrait Project’
Since 2004, Francesca Sanlorenzo, Simon Rowe and Ben Gidley have been working on the ‘Pepys Portrait Project’. The project is based on the Pepys, a council estate in Deptford, South London, a twenty-minute walk from Goldsmiths, and all three of us had a long-term engagement with the estate, as researchers or community artists, prior to the project. The project starts from the idea of the many radically different lives behind the apparently identical doors and windows of the estate. Using life story interviews and photographic portraits, we tried to reflect some of the multiple perspectives that make up the social reality of the estate. Our talk will examine some of the methodological and ethical issues of collaboration between social science and photographic art, as well as the aesthetic and epistemological choices and changes of emphasis we have made during the project.

Peter Coles, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Paris Traces’
Observations of unconscious, collective actions by Parisian residents and visitors. Photographic projects underscored by a curiosity in the city and its people.
Poubelles: In the late 1990s, terrorist bomb attacks in Paris led the authorities to seal off street litter-bins (or ‘poubelles’). Immediately, little piles of rubbish – metro tickets, Coke cans, banana skins – appeared on top of the sealed bins, only to be cleared away, and subsequently grow again. What was usually hidden –Parisians’ cast-offs – was exposed. I documented these ephemeral, collective creations over a few days, in a series of about 100 photographs.
Shoes: There are few charity shops in Paris, so people who want to pass on a good pair of shoes usually leave them, neatly, out in the street for someone to take. For the past ten years, I have been photographing these pairs of shoes, when and wherever I find them. Leather shoes often take on the character of the wearer, offering clues for speculation about who left them, and why.

Panel 6: Emerging forms

In this session, panellists will debate the changing nature of urban photography within visual arts and urban research practice. Panellists will map out personal ideas about where the future of their urban photographic practice and research might lead them. Questions addressed are:

  • Why has urban photography become such an important part of contemporary visual arts practice, and what role might interdisciplinarity play within the development of the field?
  • What are the possibilities for inter-textuality within urban photography?
  • What possibilities exist for curating/exhibiting/installing urban photography? What are the possible locales for this work?
  • Can urban photographic practice be seen as a form in which to engage public dialogue about the city in new ways?

Britt Hatzius, London Independent Photography Magazine
‘this site could be yours’
Based on her own work as a visual artist, researcher and editor, Britt will be looking at how the term ‘emerging forms’ might reflect the constant attempt at finding alternative narratives and practices across disciplinary boundaries. Drawing from different examples of projects, the presentation will deal with the’ fuzzy edges’ of photographic practice in an urban context and address concerns of process, engagement and presentation.

Theresa Mikuriya, University of Kent
‘Cryptoglyph’
My talk will focus on an artistic project which started in 2003 in Hong Kong, a collaboration between myself as a photographer and Linda Lai, a writer. The project started out as a kind of game; on a weekly basis, I would give Linda a photograph to respond to and in exchange, Linda would send me a piece of her writing to photograph. What began as a mutual challenge became an exploration of the dynamics between image and text and a pedagogical tool for photography and creative writing. In this paper, I will discuss the outcome of this project – a book entitled Cryptoglyph: Dialogues in Many Tongues in the Hidden Crevices of An Open City, paying particular attention to the Surrealist elements of chance encounter and automatism that run through it, and which were an important influence on both of us throughout its production. I will also look at the different roles that the city plays in Cryptogylph as catalyst, muse, and subject matter.

Mandy-Lee Jandrell
“Take Photo Here”, “Safari”, “Where The Grass is Green” & “Eidyllion”.
The global spread of consumerism and the aesthetic regime that accompanies it is a major area of interest to Jandrell, and one that she explores in her photographs of constructed leisure environments around the world. Jandrell scours these environments – wildlife parks, zoos, botanical gardens, historical recreations and theme parks – for her subject matter, exploring the pre-packaging of our perceptions of the ‘real’ and the belief systems that sustain them. Her photographs bring into focus the mutually dependent nature of ideologies and cultural practices, where leisure environments are constructed to appeal to the aspirations of the economic and ideological systems with which they are intertwined. Jandrell’s mode of operation veers between the amateur snapshot—evoking the engrained practices of cultural tourism—and the apparently more objective full frontal gaze of the professional documentary photographer. The casual humour of her work toys with our unblinking acceptance of these pictorial languages.

Caroline Knowles and Michael Tan, Goldsmiths, University of London and School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University
‘A Synergised Disturbance: An Artist and Sociologist Dialogue on Lifeworlds and Journeys of a pair of Flip-Flop Sandals’
Is there an affinity between the activity of an artist and a sociologist? Artists create with images and sociologists with words: the world is their common muse. What began as a personal inquiry to understand the implication of sociological thoughts in Michael Tan’s artwork has evolved into an interdisciplinary practice – a synergised disturbance. Discussions aim to examine intersections between visual art and sociological inquiry; focusing particularly on their intent to ‘map’ the world through the biography of an everyday object – the flip-flop sandal. Our dialogue follows the trail established in the production, circulation and use of a pair of flip-flops beginning in the factories in China, to one of their most significant emerging markets, in Ethiopia. Here, flip flops, as the world’s cheapest shoe, are a step up from walking barefoot for millions of people who lack alternative footwear. We follow them on the feet of an elderly woman as she walks about her daily business in shantytown in Addis Ababa. Lives, landscapes, social relationships, material culture, divergent speeds of mobility and the Chinese footprint in Africa are revealed through the world’s simplest and cheapest shoe.