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Stepan Rudik, the kids, and the Institute…

or ‘For a fistful of pixels’.

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This post is also an attempt to apologise to the unknown photographer for the previous comments I made on the Facebook forum promoted by The British Journal of Photography on the matter. In that circumstance, in fact, I suggested that the disqualified photo (from being 3rd winner at the World Press 2010 for Sport Features stories) was cropped so much that would put the whole representation out-of-context, the context of a story called “Street fighting, Kiev, Ukraine”, ‘while the original picture seems taken out of a rather innocent sport event’, as I unhappily commented.

[caption id="attachment_1073" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="disqualified photo © Stepan Rudik"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1074" align="alignright" width="300" caption="original raw photo © Stepan Rudik"][/caption]

I was terribly wrong. When in fact the first blogs started coming out with the whole series of pictures from the World Press Competition, it became immediately clear to me that not just the photo in question was well-within the context of the event narrated, but also, and crucially, that the series is a terrific reportage of a practice of street fighting. The photographs entered the competition as story (Sports Features: 3rd prize stories), not as single shot as I originally thought. This misunderstanding is even more recurrent in the articles and posts around the web, as they all focus on the manipulated photo, treating the competition entry as ‘single’ and not as a ‘story’. Therefore the jury – made of very experienced photographers and people working in the media industry – should have fully understood that, and acknowledged the photographer’s effort to be there, his relationship with ‘gatekeepers’, and his ability at documenting this dramatic practice, rather than rehearsing the fable of ‘authenticity’ and the chimera of photographic ‘truth’.

I decided to copy and publish the photographs in question, as: a) they have already been published on the Net; b) full credits are given to the author, who in fact only gets more deserved notoriety from this, and; c) the link to the original source is provided.

So, first and foremost I think we need to give credits to this photographer to have done a terrific job out there (however disputable his choice of dramatically cropping the photograph presented might be), and secondly we need to ask what are the “currently accepted standards in the industry” according to which the World Press jury disqualified the picture of the hand? In the name of the ‘integrity of our organization’ [hmmm?] and ‘high standards in photojournalism’ [sic! sic! sic!] they had to disqualify Mr. Rudik from the competition. It was the covering of a half foot behind the hand to have trigger the decision of the jury….that is frankly a disputable decision, in my modest opinion: it does not move by a bit the ‘content’ of the photo, it just corrects a slightly white dot under the blackish band. How many times, in fact, we crop, edit, and desaturate photographs in order to enhance details, to hide imperfections, or to tell a slightly different story? And, isn’t the moment of ‘shooting’ a choice in itself? Too many variables come into place before we can only think about ‘truth’ in photography, especially in the era of the digital output. The photographs in the series below, on the other hand, are so terribly ‘real’, and their attachment to the trace (of flesh and blood, literally) of the ‘real’ is far too deep to be dismissed by a few manipulated pixels. Finally speaking to the British Journal of Photography, the young free-lance photographer explains: “There are about 150-200 such groups in Kiev. It’s a closed event, where only friends are allowed. They meet in the outskirts of the city. They call it a ‘fair play’, each group fields equal amount of fighters for a fight, they don’t beat those who are already lying on the ground, and they fight until all the fighters of one of the groups are brought low”.

My impression is rather that the ‘Institute’ is striving at protecting an increasingly nervous ‘profession’, by drawing strict boundaries to the ‘discipline’, right during a dramatic and unstoppable technological change in the practice. It is almost impossible to find Rudik’s photographs submitted for the competition. On the other hand, most of the web around professional photography is focusing only on the singular photo and the presumed violation, and they are all getting quite hysterical in dismissing this guy and re-claiming the ‘truth’ violated: all for a fistful of pixels…. Is/should be there a ‘digital ethics’, as some of these discussions seem to imply? Or is it a ‘generational’ conflict between the old guard of BW film processing specialists and the new wave of Photoshop enthusiasts? And who created that aesthetic cliché for photojournalism that’s got to be BW, grainy, ‘film effect’, burned margins, dramatic cropping in order to stake a chance?

And would Stepan have left the photographs in colour, then we might have had a chance to ‘relax’ a bit more about the context in which the story unfolds? We might have had an opportunity to move away from these clichés and instead appreciate the festive climate of ‘sportive’ event in which the confrontation effectively seems to have taken place: teasing, smiling and unwritten rules of the game are here as equally important as the moral judgement of the viewers.

You can now see more work from Stepan Rudik here: I am particularly impressed by his work on migrants and the station in Moscow.

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2010 03 05 pa_card Blogging the City Comments (1)

The Community Plaza?

I have been invited to take some pictures of Peninsula Square, outside the O2 (ex-Dome, of course), as part of my practise-based research strategy, or ‘fieldwork’. The ‘informant’ for my visual tour stressed out the particularity of the night, as it would have been very busy and lively with kids and teens coming out Britney Spears’ concert. Maybe, we thought, I could have taken some photos of people lounging around the fountains, or having a few drinks around the steps, we would have heard loud laughs and cheers.

u_can_blog

I managed to get there just on time for the youngish audience to come out, and after a few photographs, about ten I would say, I was addressed by stewards who were busy channelling the concert crowd to the public transports (along the trendy canopy). They warned me that I could not take any photo, risking of being ‘arrested’. To my surprise, they were really determined to stop me doing ‘the photographer’. After some polite responses, I was soon surrounded by two gorillas, the tough guys of the security, threatening of physically removing me from the ‘private property, belonging to O2′: apparently, any enquiries and permissions for photo-activity there has to be approved by the owner ((Beware, I just sent a request to the O2 customer service, and they replied: “I would suggest you contact our press office prior to your visit. They will need to approve your photography and notify our security”!)) . Still shaking for indignation, I went away and published these pictures from the unhappy night (from my research perspective, instead, it has been very productive indeed!).

A quick browsing on the Net gave this incredible outcome (all the italics are mine):

“With everything under the actual roof of The O2 being so spectacular, you won’t be surprised to hear that we’ve applied the same ethos to the outside space. Peninsula Square features a stage for free concerts and large digital screen for video displays, making it a superb space to socialize” (theO2 website). “It’s a great place to meet with friends and relax before a show or at lunchtime” (planners’ website). “London’s newest, and highly popular, public square is already a lively gateway to The O2. It will become an important hub for the entire community at Greenwich Peninsula, a place on the making” (Resource for Urban Design Information (RUDI), “an independent unbiased service”).

Blimey! It looks like the future space of the developers, politicians, designers, architects, planners, and alike does have a completely different ‘depth’ compared to the same space seen from the perspective of an urban dweller, especially when it comes to security, policing, and controlling of that  space. For instance, we don’t know for sure if this space is public, what kind of public is allowed in there, or at what time of the day the much celebrated ‘community’ can make use of that space, and above all, what type of activities are allowed to take place beyond the ‘spectacular’. Would the same ‘ethos’ of the teflon structure be applied to the outdoor space, in the sense that the Square becomes an extension of the Mall, that is, a policed semi-public outdoor space?

private

Maybe it’s me that is biased, but let me try to make this right:

a) I am a local resident (well, -ish as I live in East Greenwich, on the other side of the physical rim of the A102), I therefore should be part of that ‘entire community’, usually understood by these very people as ‘the local’, ‘the neighbourhood’; b) I met there with a group of researchers and artists, to talk about the regeneration of the area, I therefore belong to an interested network, or ‘community of interest’; c) I am out and about doing my own business of visual research on the area, I therefore participate in my own way, and by producing my own representations, to a sense of place, a place ‘in-the-making’.

My sixth sense is telling me that this hyper-real place will be soon rebranded ‘Plaza’ or ‘Piazza’, don’t ask me why. On another front, I was warned (in conversation with Jon Prosser, Leeds University) that the Visual Culture in which we are is almost as determinant as the technology we choose: in the UK, at the present, visual sociologists feel that we are entering a ‘police state’, in which civil liberties are shrinking day by day.

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2009 06 17 pa_card Blogging the City
Imaging the City Comments (0)

Sniffing the City

What happens if some people decided to take control, in different ways, of their own images taken in public space by the millions of CCTV, by becoming conscientious actors and protagonists of the never ending film of the city (in London, there are more that half million of CCTV, 1 every 14 citizens)? What if some people started reclaiming, under the Data Protection Act, their own ‘performances’? To the extent, for instance, of making a music video, or an art installation? Or even a youth community project in alternative media practices thanks to ‘video sniffing’, that is, the hacking of loose digital videos from unencrypted cameras and their remixing. With a bit of poetry, we might even think to drifting through the policed city following the unpredictable waves of ethereal signals (Inspired by the praxis of the Situationist International, some of these art projects invite to disrupt the hegemonic power of capital-driven urbanism and to re-fresh our understanding of the city by exploring civic relationships through play, in order to bridge personal and public space, individual and collective experience, and physical and historical condition, into a rhizomatic generative urban drift).unusual_image CC

Media commentators are quick at condemning the increasing practice as illegal, but this is at very least a gray area: who does my picture, captured in public space, belong to? Whatever the techniques, it seems clear to me that what is at stake here is the narrative of CCTV as uncomplicated and self-evident. On the other hand, media and criminologists (alongside the expanding industry of the digital surveillance systems) make no mistake on the goals of this unprecedented mapping coverage of the urban population: the ideological and politicized program of urban restructuring must go on in the name of a “safer” public space. Moreover, there is an increasing attention to the effects of video surveillance on people’s behaviour. As Hille Koskela (2000) maintains:

“video-surveillance changes the ways in which power is exercised, modifies emotional experiences in urban space and affects the ways in which ‘reality’ is conceptualized and understood. Surveillance contributes to the production of urban space” ((Hille Koskela, The Gaze without Eyes, Sage, 2000)) .

The counter-surveillance of the alternative video-practice attempts to do the same. You might want to check this post out, as well.

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2009 05 18 pa_card Imaging the City
Playing the City Comments (0)

Urban Planning: some thoughts

According to Campbell and Cowan (2002), “the planning system is not working for cities. We have a development control system, not a development planning system. The planning system is tortuously quasi-legal, doing its best to avoid any basis of physical design. It fails to give a vision of place except through words. A development plan map does little more than define policy areas and constraints. The system is geared to think about new towns, where places can be neatly zoned into discrete areas. The planning system cannot deal with complexity” ((K Campbell and R. Cowan, Re:urbanism, Urban Exchange, 2002:28)) . “Cities are complex networks with infinite inter-relationships, operating in different ways at different times of the day, the week and the year…” [complexity: the state of being composed of many interconnected parts. In a complex system a large number of independent elements interact. The system acquires collective properties of its own through those elements clashing with or accommodating each other. The structure of the network can be understood only as being constantly in transition as it responds to ever-changing conditions].

The problems lie deep in the anti-city origins of town planning, born of garden cities and Modernism. They are at the heart of Town and Country Planning Act [no mention of cities here]: “Every new Masterplan seems to have a combination of some of the same few design features: the landmark tower, the visitors attraction, the public space. They offer city varieties, not cities form” (ibidem: my italics).

“Sites like the Greenwich Peninsula are big enough to change the shape and the operation of entire parts of the city. They are big enough to create their internal world. Yet the planning system treats each almost as though it were an infill site in a local town centre…The disconnected blogs of development are as foreign to each other as they are to the surrounding environment. Although they are supposed to be publicly accessible, they entrances are often gated and their internal roads are designed to feel private. This is the realm of the CCTV camera, that gloomy emblem of urban dysfunction. Connections to the surrounding road network are kept to the minimum. The developments turn their backs on their neighbours or build buffers between them. The developer, offering exclusivity, has excluded urbanity” (cited: 33).

The traffic engineer’s unchallenged truths are rooted in an obsession to eliminate conflict at all costs. A roundabout (which is usually in fact four T-junctions) is the best way to reduce conflicts [and fly-over?]. Everything is pre-arranged. By eliminating conflict we are robbing the city of its first signs of civic interaction: the chance meeting, the eye contact that establishes dialogue, the smile and the offer to give way. Good urbanism manages this interaction. “The streets has been lost as central focus for making decisions about cities. It has fallen into the hands of the controllers. Their aims include safety, neatness, order, exclusivity and best value performance targets. Every action is intended to solve what is seen as a problem caused by excessive interaction between people and other people, or people and motor traffic” (cited: 56).

“Urban design has its unchallenged truths. Walkability is a favourite concept of American new urbanists. But drawing a 400-metre walk-band over an area does not make it work as a neighbourhood or support mixed uses. In a city what matters is the total journey from origin to destination – from home to work, for example – not just the walk to the corner shop.” (cited: 40-41).

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2009 04 22 pa_card Blogging the City
Playing the City
Tagging the city Comments (0)

Ouch, you have been framed!

It sounds more and more likely that the Police have something to do with the death of a newsagent at the rally in the City of London. Many witnesses have come forward and most importantly there is The Picture: the evidence, the forensic clue, the probatio, the real stuff judges love and on which the surveillance culture of the streets in this country has been built upon. Mr Tomlinson is on the floor, surrounded by police officers, his hands near his head as he had been struck on the head. He looks dazed in the photograph as if suffering from concussion. Besides, at the same time that the man collapsed, police had begun an unprovoked assault upon a crowd that wanted to go home after being penned without facilities for over 7 hours, and it seems more than likely to me that Mr Tomlinson may have received blows to the head. The police instead claim that the man was a passer-by who suffered a sudden heart attack, and that they tried to intervene in order to save him, despite the launch of ‘missiles’ from the protesters.

I understand that photos and videos can deceive, and that they rarely hold the truth. On the other hand, inevitably, they carry some sort of attachment to the real: the man was there, the police were armed in anti-riot gear, and they were pushing demonstrators back at that time. Suspicion, at very least, is a legitimate stance.

But this post is not about what happened at Bishopsgate on Wednesday evening. Nor it is a discussion about the meanings of documentary photography. Instead, it hopes to show how awful is the pretension in place in the UK since 16th February 2009: to take a photo of a policeman or police woman without their permission is a new offence, section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000, inserted by section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. It makes it an offence to elicit, attempt to elicit, publish or communicate information about an individual who is or has been a constable, or a member of the armed forces or intelligences services.

According to Labour MP, Mr. Malik: “The important thing is that the photographs would have to be of a kind likely to provide practical assistance to terrorists, and the person taking or providing the photograph would have to have no reasonable excuse, such as responsible journalism, for taking it. It does not criminalise the normal taking of photographs of the police. Police officers have the discretion to ask people not to take photographs for public safety or security reasons, but the taking of photographs in a public place is not subject to any rule or statute. There are no legal restrictions on photography in a public place, and there is no presumption of privacy for individuals in a public place” ((My italics, of course. You can follow the full debate here)) .

Obviously, we don’t know what a ‘reasonable excuse’ is, nor what ‘responsible journalism’ means. The discretion of the Police on judging the matter is all too evident and frankly quite appalling.

The one above is a beautiful example of just why the Police and Politicians want it to be a criminal offence to photograph and video police on the street.

policing

In addition, throughout the day of the anticapitalist demonstrations, police photographers pointed camcorders and cameras with powerful zoom lenses at us: the CCTV-man was protected and instructed by two officers around him all the time. This was a clear attempt to intimidate people and the implied threat being that you were being watched (remember the Panopticon?), and that your attendance was itself a criminal act worthy of surveillance. The most amazing fact related to this, in fact, is that there are a lot of people who now think police can act – should act – to stop people from demonstrating.

I think it’s a good idea to be aware of the visual culture you work in. In the UK, in fact, visual researchers are beginning to feel that we are moving towards a police state and the internet is rife with problems about taking photographs in the street and issues about terrorism and state security.

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2009 04 06 pa_card Blogging the City Comments (3)

The Physical Rim, aka A102(M)

The confusion starts with the naming of it, and names are utterly important. The roads have been given specific numbers according to their grade so not to confuse motorists. The south stretch of the road going from Blackwall Tunnel down to Kidbrooke, across Est Greenwich and Eltham, has a long peculiar story. It has many names and denominations too. It is fascinating reading through its history and going back to the debates in the House of Commons before the Plan for its implementation, the infamous Ringroad 1, one of the four planned all around the capital in the early Seventies. Rather than summarise this story, I give you a couple of links, below. To cut a long story very short, the motorway went ahead for this part of London, while most of the Plan was scrapped, conflating in the infamous M25.

What I am interested in is first of all the unpacking of the rhetoric that at the time accompanied the building of the motorway (by the way, for a bureaucratic reason it has been downgraded to an A road, A12, but it has all the characteristic of an M road, including the SOS and the six lanes). An incredible leaflet, a ruin of the time, has been found and rescued from oblivion by the weblog cited thereafter, from which I have also taken a couple of images. As I haven’t had a chance to read it myself, I can only point out to the original source and to the comments made around it:

footbridge

“It’s a Greater London Council document about the proposed new Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach Road (the A102). Charmingly, one of the ingredients is ribbed concrete. The pamphlet can hardly conceal its excitement that this is the very same material that had just been used on the new elephant house at London Zoo. In similarly excited terms we are told of exotic materials such as ‘grit-blasted’ and even ‘fair-faced’ concrete. Innovations such as electrical road heating on the Woolwich Road Flyover (blimey…) emergency telephones and traffic surveillance equipment would be installed. Truly a Seventies Dream” ((extract from “The Greenwich Phantom”)) .

Let us go back for now to the debate in the House of Common, where at the end of 1971 we find the Labour MP for Woolwich West, William Hamling questioning the GLC planning of radial system to the then under-secretary of state for environment, Mr Michael Heseltine. Here, the concerns for Eltham being closed off by a box of road and lorries going around the streets of Greenwich sound very actual indeed, and if it wasn’t for the price of property (£ 10,000 circa) we would not imagine this discourse as being articulated a long time ago:

“…If one looks at the motorway map for London one can see that this network will cause a tremendous change in the character of London. It will isolate thousands and thousands of homes. We shall be involved in the destruction of many houses, many of them modern houses, perfectly desirable houses, houses which, in a free market today, command prices of ¬£10,000. It is not just the destruction of homes; it is the destruction of urban life as we know it, and the emergence of an urban life which is unreal, artificial and unacceptable to the people of London.

This is something which the planners do not always understand. After all, most of the people who talk and write about these plans do not themselves live in London. They do not live in the areas which will be so drastically affected. Those of us who live in London, who live with the ordinary people of London and who know where the shoe pinches do not accept that this kind of concept can lead to anything but the carving up of London once again and the emergence of a pattern of urban life which is uncivilised and dehumanised. The prospect of 40- and 50-ton lorries coming off the motorways and going through Plumstead, Charlton and Greenwich fills me with horror” ((MOTORWAYS, LONDON House of Commons Deb 15 December 1971 vol 828 cc746-64 746v)) .

subway

I found this extract particularly touching, for its actuality and ability to foresee what in fact happened. Find more current pictures in my photoblog, in particular my impression of the footbridge. As marginal note to our discussion, there are also proposals in the same debate to facilitate travel fares for elderly people, or the few pennies bus fare for all in order to relaunch the public transport system as an alternative to private transport, and the concerns for the deserted river (sounds familiar? now at least there is a chance to travel fast on the Clipper, while drinking a glass of champagne!)….

Anyway, the end of our story is that the few bits of the radial system to be implemented were the south part of the Ringroad 1, with an additional top-up in the golden age of the LDDC: ‘When the Ringway plans were dropped, the traffic situation in Eltham was so bad that the former A2(M) plan was resurrected and the ensuing construction works were the largest and most complex new road in London in the 1980s’. The rest was blend into the disastrous M25, but this is another story… ((many more details here: the CBRD website is an amateur’s project and they have done a wonderful work of post-industrial archaeology on the planning of the Ringroads or Radial System. They also say: ‘From some perspectives it’s starting to look like the project wasn’t just halted, but comprehensively destroyed – either to prevent further bad publicity or simply to reduce storage costs’)) .

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2009 03 17 pa_card Dreaming the City
Remembering the City Comments (0)

The “Sustainable” in the Sustainable Communities

How sustainable is ‘sustainability’? What is its symbolic value? It seems that lower expectations are the new order of things, a sense of austerity and more importantly an ‘appropriate’ level of utilization of energetic resources and consumption. Without addressing economic ‘golden rules’ of long term growth, we might want to ask instead for whom would this sustainability be sustainable, for how long, and what this sustainability effectively does? What is its strategic deployment?

There is a sense in which, in fact, “sustainability” involves some strong moral values of renunciation of easy pleasure and sacrifice, till the point to arrive to ‘a kind of vocation that will allow us to discover our “authentic” selfhood, a kind of secular version of the monastic. At least in the Middle Ages, the simple life, the accession to authenticity through the renunciation of mirage-like pleasure, was reserved for a noble minority; it was necessarily a minority because most people obviously tended to choose another kind of life ‘ ((Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, 2007:120-124 )) .

Sustainability: never a word in the planning, design, and development vocabulary has been so misused. Simplistic sustainability rejoices in everything green. ‘Sustainable urban extensions’ are a solution of the moment. Whatever they are meant to be sustaining, it is not the town or city whose edge they tentatively inhabit. In our pursuit of sustainability we target single environmental issues, and we reward schemes for their success in dealing with a single aspect. The result: the eco-friendly food store that conserves energy through its design, but whose location generates excessive numbers of car journeys; the eco-friendly housing whose single minded orientation towards the sun denies the chance to make successful streets and spaces; and the millennium village whose claim to be sustainable depends largely on its construction methods, but which stands isolated, served by overblown roads and supported only by the eco-friendly superstore sitting in the sea of car parking ((K. Campbell and R. Cowan, Re:urbanism, Urban Exchange, 2002:49)) .

According to J. and M. Corbett ((J. and M. Corbett, Designing Sustainable Communities, 2000: 173-184, Island Press)) ,

‘a sustainable community is one that allows its inhabitants to live in a way that does not damage the environment or consume non-renewable resources. At the same time, a sustainable community supports the realization of human potential’ (2000:7, emphasis added).

“Sustainability”, then, implies virtue. It reminds us of a small, efficient, controlled environment. At the end, I have the impression that the use of “sustainability” is just that of another powerful signifier of communal life, symbolically different and opposite to the ones of the others. Another matter of distinction, so to speak. How do we get from the “saint” model of individual, isolated, active self, storing his energy (Calvinist?), to the community? First of all you need a plan, then designers and architects with artistic edge, and finally you need the involvement of the resident to build the community and (literally) the place. ‘Designing a new garden city or garden village neighbourhood or redesigning an existing urban area requires an integration of many different requirements into a land use plan. The critical role of aesthetic and citizens participation must also be considered. And most important the Plan must be implemented’.

‘To masterfully design nurturing spaces, one must also be intuitively sensitive to the ambience of spaces: the shades of mood and feeling that spaces evoke and the meanings they suggest. The designer must be able to arrange spaces to evoke the desired feeling, meaning and mood. The solutions must integrate ambience and function’ (Corbett, cited).

a sustainable plan

Crucial to the success of the Plan, it is the strong idea than the environment determines the behaviour of the individuals, which it has been a very important topic throughout all my blog (click on one of the tags on the sidebar, e.g. Architecture, or Framing the City categories). But I found quite incredible that this idea is grounded in the utopian dream of the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard 1898, the Victorian educator who based his urban vision on a strong moralistic paradigm. Finally, in order to achieve this, you need to call into play the vox populi, and one of the way to do this is to use art in public space (to which a few entries were dedicated in the previous posts). Again, according to our experts in design (Michael Corbett served as mayor of Davis California in the second half of the Eighties, ‘One of the many choices he made as Mayor to keep the “Village” concept strong’, and they are both successful writers), one of the ‘excellent’ citizens participation tool is the computer simulation:

‘The process of designing sustainable communities requires the use of geographic information systems (GSI) technology to prepare an integrated design solution; it requires strong artistic talent on the part of the urban planner, landscape architect, or architect to make the end satisfying to the senses; and it requires involvement of citizens in the process to ensure an appropriate design and the development of community ownership and pride. If these steps are followed, sociality will enjoy the multiple benefits of more sustainable and emotionally satisfying communities’.

Often though, people are being consulted on a single issue; they are being asked to act as designers; “they are being persuaded that their own best interests coincide with what has already been planned or designed; or the initiators of the process are merely going through the motions of involving the public so they can tick a box on an official form. The toy-box is full of  planning games, geared to turning potential conflicts into manageable consensus.” ((K. Campbell and R. Cowan, Re:urbanism, Urban Exchange, 2002:52)) .

I need to open a long parenthesis here on the role of images in the process of shaping individual’s consciousness. ‘Space has a history. It is not as Kant would have it, the product of a priori, inherently Euclidean, categories of mind. It is a product of representation [Thrift on stage and performance]. No space of representation without a subject, and no subject without a space it is not. No subject without a boundary. In so far as geometry is a science of boundaries, we might say that the origin of geometry is in the abjection ((Victor Burgin, Geometry and Abjection1990: 109)) . I need to explain this a little bit further as it sounds crucial to my argument. Since Cartesian philosophy, the light had been represented in geometrical terms, a spectrum coming from the object and converging to the retina. Though this geometry of triangles and converging cones, we are thought to be able to calculate the distance and orientation of the objects. ‘As the retina became the site of the convergence of light rays to paint a picture of the object inside the eye, so the mind, for some philosophers, became identified with a camera obscura. We see not objects but pictures of objects. Rather than the antique idea that the eye is the emitter of the light, the geometry of vision suggested that we are fundamentally receivers of light: like a camera obscura, a human being is a picture-capturing device. The mind then is like an enclosure, a private space that contains images’ ((Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa, 2002:21)) . Then, it came Lacanian psychoanalysis and the idea of the mirror stage, in which human subjects are faced with the necessity to identify with images of completeness, and mimicry and automatic imitation seem to come even before cognition. The argument is that of the alienation involved in this process: ‘We are not identical with mirror images, and we can never fully go into their place, just as we can never fully go into the place of other people. Lacan’s point here is about the power of images to capture us. Images mould us, transfix us, captivate us and alienate us. We become who we are partly through becoming like others. Far from being picture-capturing devices, humans are perpetually being caught by pictures. An image, or picture, is a human-capturing device’ (cited: 24-25). Moreover, by moving this argument a little bit further, our own visual perception of ourselves, projected as it is in the future space of the computer simulation, depends in part on how we think we are seen by someone else: what does the Other expect us to be or behave?

Sustainability: never a word in the planning, design, and development vocabulary has been so misused. Simplistic sustainability rejoices in everything green. ‘sustainable urban extensions’ are a solution of the moment. Whatever they are meant to be sustaining, it is not the town or city whose edge they tentatively inhabit.

“In our pursuit of sustainability we target single environmental issues, and we reward schemes for their succes in dealing with a single aspect. The result: the eco-friendly foodstore that conserves energy through its design, but whose location generates excessive numbers of car journeys; the eco-friendly housing whose single minded orientation towards the sun denies the chance to make successful streets and spaces; and the millennium village whose claim to be sustainable depends largely on its construction methods, but which stands isolated, served by overblown roads and supported only by the eco-friendly superstore sitting in the sea of car parking” (Campbell and Cowan, cited: 49).

Just out of curiosity, one of the row that seemed to come out from the the Village Homes (developed by the Corbetts at the end of the Seventies, seen as high risk investment by bankers, became one of the most expensive and desirable places in California) was about the orchards and the right to pick up fruit. This sounds funny, but it is crucial to understand the issue of the boundaries, the maintanace of community relationship with the Others, which in the view of New Urbanist should be kept tougher. According to the Village Homeowners Association “only residents of Village Homes are allowed to pick up produce from the common areas. You are encouraged to introduce yourself and anyone you see picking if he or she is a resident…and you should politely explain to nonresident that village homes is private propriety” ((Mark Francis, Village Homes: a case-study in community design, Landscape Journal, 21:1-2002)) .

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2009 03 06 pa_card Comments (0)

Pineal Eye

The pinnacle was the cupola of the temple in Jerusalem, notably a hole in order to allow the symbolic ascension of Christ. For Bataille, the pineal eye will mark the hole at the top, the highest point not only in the panorama but also in the hierarchy: pinea derives from pine cone, cupola. ‘The pineal eye is not an organ but a “fantasy” or a “myth”: it is neither a model, nor a copy: it is an image with no resemblance. According to this reading of Battaile, then, the pineal eye cannot be made object of communication, and as a result, it is inscribed ‘outside the the structures of transmission of knowledge whose rules imply that only the repeatable can be thought’ ((D. Hollier, The writings of George Bataille, 121)) . Moreover, this image occupies a phallic position produced by the dialectic erection/castration: on one hand, the human form lends itself to complete erectness; on the other, the panoramic view, the eyes on the horizon are excluded from the movement of vertical erection. In his own words “Man’s gaze is emasculated”. There is in fact a premium for the positions at the edge, or for the taller ones, from which the view is not obstructed by other office buildings, it is unconditionate on the city as abstract, from above and at distance: ‘The demand for a long view means that the symbolic capital of a building is linked not only to its site but also to the tower as a building type with a service core surrounded by a rim of rentable space…corporate culture seeks to inhabit tall buildings in lower rise districts. The towers grow ever upwards and outwards, the quest is for both height and dispersal’ (Dovey, cited; 115-119).

‘It is this failure of virile verticality that the pineal eye would come to fill in for [as experience of] castration, which therefore is not an absence of virility. It is rather something that constitutes virility. Sexual emasculation comes to atone for the emasculation of the gaze…Although it menaces the phallus in reality, castration, thus, is what constitutes symbolic phallocentrism’ ((D. Hollier, cited: ‘Castration, no doubt, makes the phallus disappear, but at the same time this disappearance provides its real status, because it is the very essence of the phallus that it be lacking. The phallus is produced by that which it denies it. It is only a reappropriation of the negative)) .

So, how does this symbolic element manifest itself? More pragmatically, Kim Dovey applies discourse analysis to 72 brochures, phamphlets, and advertising spots, about office towers and tall storeys, as an entry point into global corporate culture. If towers above 10-20 storeys started exceeding their functional efficiency and the dominant views are lost as more towers occupy the skyline, she asks, how can we justify in economic terms their erection (lapsus)? Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, in fact, we can make up for the difference, that sense of distinction given by the symbolic (literally power, hierarchy, fertility, height), aesthetic (uniqueness of form, landmarks), or mythological ‘aura’ (timelessness: past and future are magically blend together): signs which need to be built in a chain of signifiers by way of, for instance, reflecting the primary values of those towards whom they are directed, that is the corporate elite. Advertising is in fact the primary circuit through which the symbolic capital manifests itself. Again, as Bataille before, there is a need of decoding the myths of advertising as ideology, to articulate the experience into which the corporate executive is induced. On this there are a few pictures in my photoblog, a series called “You Can”.

‘The advertising portrays an ideal rather than a reality; it distorts as it mythologizes. Distorsions are also indications of the ideals and values that may be driving the image-making process’ ((K. Dovey, Framing Places, 1999: 108, Routledge))

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2009 02 25 pa_card Dreaming the City
Imaging the City Comments (0)

The Face of the Other

live

…Is this person gay? Is s/he British? Is this person happy? Intelligent? These are some of the strong questions participants were asked to cast their vote about when faced with the anonymous picture of a stranger in latest Christian Nold‘s provocative installation. Over 14,000 people in one month cast their vote in the ‘Community Metrics in Nottingham (UK) and decide ‘live’ who of the volunteers should be deported: a sort of ‘friendly fascism’, a dystopian version of Facebook, a tease out of many reality TV shows.

The installation prompted me to read again (that’s what is good about radical art!) Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on ethics: for the French philosopher, whose family was wiped out by the Holocaust, ethics begins with the direct encounter with the face of the Other. This action is ethical because, rather than knowing, and hence objectifying the other, by way of static representation, in the face-to-face encounter,

‘The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves in me…the Other signals but does not present themselves’ ((E. Levinas, cited in R. Durie. Face to Face: directions in contemporary women’s portraiture’)) .

There is a sense in which, by making an image of this overflowing, by reducing the Other to a set of conventions, a-priori categories, and image-repertoire, we might be perpetrating a form of violence, which hence denies the alterity expressed by the face of the Other.

For Skeggs (2004) ((B. Skeggs, Class, Self, and Culture, 2004: 155)) , rather, in the urban context that brings people into contact, “these encounters force a reading of proximate bodies and, in some cases, generate a need for boundary maintenance. It is not just the encounter, but the relationships generated from the encounter between bodies that rely on prior systems of inscription – rhetoric, representation, discourse – that…positions some groups as the ground of fixity, otherness, strangeness and danger”.

This opens a big problem for representation, especially visual, to the extent that the object of representation always falls under the power of thought. Jacques Lacan notoriously develops a new form of epistemology based on the Four Discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst), which produce four respective apprehensions to knowledge. As Kirsten Campbell explains it ((K. Campbell, ‘Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology’, Routledge, 2004: 37-39)) :

‘Reality is a function of discourse, for discourse produces both the world that is known, and the only world that can be known. Knowledge is contingent upon the discursive position of the knower. However, that subjective structure is necessarily an effect of discursive structure. By taking up a speaking position, the knower thereby is enmeshed in the fundamental relations of discourse…Discourse produces the known object, since the object can only be represented through signifying structures. The act of knowing is an act of representation that the stable structures of signifying chains produce. Therefore, knowledge itself has a discursive structure and thereby is rethought as the product of signification. [Crucially] In later Lacan’s epistemology, what is know is inseparable from how it is known‘ (cit: 54-55, my emphasis).

But, what is the nature of this objectification? According to Derrida ((Jacques Derrida: ‘Right of inspection’, photographs by Marie-Francoise Plissart; New York, Monacelli Press, 1998)) , there is an unequal exchange between the viewer and the subject portrayed: the former holds a position within which is inscribed the power to dominate, whilst the latter, the photographed face, is silent because it cannot express or represent itself, the source of its significance is then placed in the viewer. There is then an intrinsic rhetoric, a grammar, a symbolic practice, a pose of the act of taking photographs of others, a division of positions between ‘looking at’ and ‘looked at’, a structural binary determination that is not easily broken. How can we achieve a grammar of non-violence in visual representation?

‘A true photograph of the face – one which is not objectifying, one which does not deny the faciality of the face – would be one which ‘represents’ the unpresentable look of the face’ (Durie, cit:38).

One way of representing the face of the other respectfully is in the radical involvement of the subject within the dynamics of representation. That is, in a process that goes beyond the “shooting back” techniques of the recent years. For instance, the different techniques of self portraiture might instigate a loop of signification between the looker and the looked at, ‘a loop which excludes any possible interruptions from an outsider, who might want to determine the meaning of the subject, and hence objectifying her, from a privileged position beyond the frame’ (ibidem: 50). Or something deeper, that question the overall image of ourselves as founded on particular images which are stored in our memory and which are the product of various photographic practices (first of all the photo album, or the family portrait). Jo Spence’s and Rosy Martin’s phototherapy seems to address this difficulty: the subject is invited to re-enact their own perceptions and memories , retaining maximum control on the representation. Photo-therapy is not just about performances, but involves a relationship with the other ((“Family snaps: the meanings of domestic photography” / edited by Jo Spence and Patricia Holland. London: Virago , 1991)) . ‘The aim of the practice is to interrupt the objectifying influence of these images on our self-perception, reconstructing or reinventing the images in order that they might work with the subject in the creation of her or his self-image’ (in Durie, cit: 30). But is it there a ‘real’ face? An image of oneself to be held upon against the performative? In what sense Barthes declared: ‘The mask is the meaning”?

What these examples might imply is that, if ‘discursive structures delimit what is thinkable and signifiable as knowledge, [then] to change those structures is to change how we know the world’ (Campbell, cit: 55). In this sense, we might say with John Berger  that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. Meanings exist only at risk, they are never fixed, never arrested.

Simmel wrote a brief and very important article ‘The Stranger’ (1908), in which the notion of ‘estrangement’ has some flexibility, according to the shifting notion of ‘human commonness’. As I read it, he makes a crucial link between the alterity of the stranger and the affective bond of community. I think Simmel’s position embeds the discourse on representations of types, very similar to the one highlighted in the post. Playing with the concepts of nearness and distance, he links the ’stranger-danger’ discourse to the symbolic construction of community. The ‘estrangement’ happens “when the consciousness that only the quite general is common, stresses that which is not common” ((George Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, 1908/1950: p. 3)) .
But, I ask, how do we get to that consciousness? What role has photographic representation in the construction of the symbolic community? What notions of homogeneity and togetherness are we prioritizing when we attempt to photograph what we see as a ‘community’? And, what kind of idea of community this discourse imply in the first place?
Others, like Richard Sennet, privilege the encounter with strangers as at the very heart of urban living, from which an incomplete sense of personal identity, as well as re-assembled communities (I think here of Jan-Luc Nancy and Iris Marion Young), might emerge. Others, so to speak, might refuse a blase’ attitude to the metropolis. I think there is hope in Levinas’ ethics.

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2009 02 08 pa_card Imaging the City
Remembering the City Comments (0)

Framing the City

‘To Frame’ is an ambiguous term with at least two meanings: a) enclose, box in, case, encase, mount, surround and; b) formulate, conceive, establish, create, plan, map out, plot, sketch, draw up, draft, shape, form, model, fashion, mould, forge, assemble, put together, build, set up, erect, construct, set in context.

According to Kim Dovey (1999), ‘architecture and urban design ‘frames’ space, both literally and discursively. In the literal sense, everyday life ‘takes place’ and action is structured and shaped by the decision of designers. As a form of discourse, built form constructs and frames meanings. Places tell us stories; we read them as spatial text’. Famous artist and architect Victor Pasmore said:

‘Artist and architect speak the same language…Urban environment is an artificial landscape so the process of constructing it is nor unlike making a pictorial composition through which you move imaginatively…Space is a function of feeling’.

But, it is in the interplay between the literal and discursive meanings of ‘framing’ that architecture re-produces, mediates, and constructs power relationships. Remember Benjamin’s idea that we experience architecture dis-attentively: we take the built environment for granted, we walk through, gaze about, even touch around, without noticing any more. More precisely, he writes:

“The condition of consciousness in its multiple patterns of sleep and awakening has only to be transferred from the individual to the collective. To the latter of course many things are internal that are external to the individual: architecture, fashion, yes, even the weather are in the interior of the collective what organ sensations, feelings of illness or health are in the interior of individual. And so long as thay persist in unconscious and amorphous dream form, they are just as much natural processes as the digestive process, respiration, etc. They stand in the cycle of the ever-identical until the collective gets its hands on them politically, and history emerges out of them” ((W. Benjamin, V, p.492 [K l, 5]))

Dovey, again:

‘This relegation of built form to the unquestioned frame is the key to its relation to power. The more that the structures and representations of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. This is what lends built form a prime role as ideology. It is what Bourdieu calls the ‘complicitous silence’ of place as a framework to life that is its deepest associations with power’ ((Kim Dovey, ‘Framing Places: Mediating Power in the Built Form’, 1999, London, Routledge)) .

The challenge is then the necessity to unpack this relationship, because built form seems to frame both action and representation simultaneously.

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2009 02 06 pa_card Comments (0)

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