Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the city as represented by art photography has been shown as progressively empty and alienating. While the emptiness of nineteenth-century streets was due to the limitations of photographic technology, it was actively pursued as a formal device by the New Topographics photographers. Recent art photography shows an even more pronounced trend towards showing the city as vacant. This contrasts starkly with the densely populated, bustling, urban environments typical of twentieth-century street photography. This essay argues that images of an empty contemporary city can be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form, and as a consequence of art photography's distancing of itself from vernacular representations of the city when the distinction between art photography and vernacular photography is at risk of collapsing. Empty urban images tell us about modes of experience in the contemporary city and about photography itself. This essay uses the trope of the banal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’ that typifies the contemporary photographic discourse of the street. Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Melanie Manchot both address the everyday street as an acute site for understanding the negotiation of public space and contemporary experiences of the city. Both refer to yet go beyond the dichotomy of the city as empty or full and reveal a different set of relations to the street through photography.