Lecture 3
The city as a figure in both film and photography
The city in modernism, the possibility of an urban sociology, the city as a public and private space, the city in postmodernism, the relation of the individual to the crowd in the city
Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918)
German sociologist, writes ‘metropolis’ and ‘mental life’ in 1903
Dresden Exhibition
Simmel is asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual
Herbert Bayer ‘Lonely Metropolitan’ - 1932
Urban sociology - Lewis Hines
The resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social technological mechanism… What the individual can do to survive and change to the experience
Architect Louis Sullivan (1856 - 1924)
Creator of the modern skyscraper
An influential architect and critic
organic decorations influenced by the arts and crafts movement. Example - Guaranty Building - Dictating how a person moves through space from the design of a building
Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago
Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business oppertunity, represents the ideas of the ‘American dream’.
Charles Scheeler
Works for Ford company, commisioned to photograph the plant at River Rouge (Detroit 1927). Steel forms and arrangements of forms in place influeneced by the abstract art of the time
Fordism - Mechanised labour relations, not just about workers producing the goods, but affordable goods produced by the workers and their ability to afford them
Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin
Struggles to become at one with the machine, a comment on the aspect of modernity
Stock Market crash of 1929
factories close and unemployment rises heavily
Leads to the ‘great depression’
Flaneur
He term ‘flaneur comes from the french masculine noun flaneur which has the basic meaning of stroller, lounger and saunterer
Charles Baudelaire
The nineteenth century french poet Baudelaire proposes a version of the flaneur that ’ a person who walks the city in order to experience it’
Art should capture this
Walter Benjamin
Adopts this idea of the urban observer, used as an analitcal tool, applying the ideas of the flaneur to his own life- ‘Berlin Chronicle/ Berlin Childood (memoirs)
‘Cafe society’
Photographer as Flaneur
Susan Sontag on photograohy
An armed version of the stroller, discovering the city as a landscape and of voluptuous extremes, stealing images from an environment. Connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world ‘picturesque’
Flaneusee
The invisible flaneuse. women and the literature of modernity
janet Wolff
Susan Buck-Morss
The dialects of seeing
Arbus/ Hopper
‘Woman at a counter smoking’ (1962) Real sense of inbetween moment,
Automan (1927) Sense of foreboding, sense of dread and an anticipated event
Sophie Calle ‘Suite Venitienne’ (1980)
Records mans every move, following strangers, develops relationship and then loses sight of them.
Venice
City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time will always end up going back where you begin
‘Dont Look Now’ (1973) - Nicholas Roeg
The Detective (1980)
Wants to provide the photographic evidence of her existence
Has person photograph her
Cindy Sherman Untitled FIlm Stills (1977 - 80)
Here is New York book/ exhibition
3000 photographs, larger archive
Weegee (Arthur Felig)
The Naked City 1945, 1948
POSTMODERNISM
Cities of the future / past - Fritz Lang - Metropolis
Ridley Scott - Bladerunner (1982/ 2019) LA
Lorca di Corcia - Heads (2001) NY
Walker Evans - Many are called (1938)
concealed camera, photographing people on the tube, interesting exposure of inner city life
9/11 citizen journalism: The end of the flaneur?S
9/11 and 7/7 events, mobile phone imagery, online within half and hour of the event
Surveillance city
Since the attack on the world trade centres in 2001 there has been as enormous ramping up of the investment in machine reading technologies, movements always tracked and followed, used as evidence against us.
