The Philadelphia Look: Exploring Urban Place‐Making through Street Style Photography

Abstract

AbstractIs there a Philadelphia look, a shared sartorial sensibility that is distinctive to this city and nowhere else? Does a city imprint itself upon its residents in some discernible, observable way? Are Philadelphians actively engaged in a communal project of place‐making through their everyday practices of dress? And if so, what does that project look like? What kinds of aesthetics does it produce, reproduce, and combine?These are some of the questions I have pondered these last five years as I have combed the streets of Philadelphia, taking hundreds of photographs of “stylish” pedestrians in their everyday attire. It is also a question I have frequently asked the people I photograph. This photo essay explores the question through thirty black and white, head‐to‐toe portraits of Philadelphians, taken on alleys, sidewalks, and roadways throughout the city, and it uses quotes from my street interviews with them to gesture toward this aesthetic commonality‐in‐the‐making. The question of “what is the Philadelphia look?” it suggests, is one that can only be addressed visually. The photographs presented demonstrate the very elusiveness and slipperiness of Philadelphia's style, a categorical refusal to be categorized that somehow, perhaps paradoxically, produces its own patterned repetitions, its own assemblages of themes, moods, and attitudes that cohere, however temporarily, into something resembling a “look.”