Photography, light, the city
One book that explicitly addresses photography and the city in Australia is one by Melissa Miles entitled The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography. Miles had argued in the early chapters of the book that the colonialist metaphors of progress as a coming of light pervaded Australian photography, and that such metaphors helped to produce myths of the timelessness of white occupation that continued to support the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people.
In chapter 3 Miles states that the fascination of light continued with modern Australian urban photography and argues that urban photographers represented the illuminated city as a dream world or as sites of wonder; engaged in photographic experimentation; and embraced metaphors of light and progress to represent local ambitions for modernity or to comment critically on its realities.
Whitcombe St, P. Drew, Mugshots
The emphasis on modernist photography in the 1930s and 1940s, which is understood as the dynamic new replacing the old is centred around Max Dupain and Wolfgang Sievers. Also mentioned by Miles are Harold Cazneaux, Frederick Flood, Olive Cotton and Mark Strizic in relation to their focus on urban light.
For the 21st century Miles foregrounds the urban photography of David Stephenson, Bill Henson and Mark Kimber in relation to urban light. Though the latter lives in Adelaide Miles interprets Kimber’s Edgeland series of photos that were made around Port Adelaide as being off stark and empty spaces, locations of short-term occupation in which the built structures appear temporary. This exemplifies placelessness or non-place, rather than being an expression of a meaningful experience of a particular place.
Pirie St, Adelaide CBD
The implication is that Adelaide, unlike Sydney or Melbourne, does not have a presence over and above being a non-place of transient connections —- fleeting , ephemeral and temporary —- just like those of a freeway, airport or petrol station. What if the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent is the characteristic of the city in industrial modernity and not just non-places?
This was Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry and essay The Painter of Modern Life: urban modernity is the replacement of permanence and solidity with transience and fragmentation. In his essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Benjamin held that Baudelaire is the representative poet of urban capitalist modernity and that his poetry makes makes present the character of urban capitalist modernity in the early twentieth century.
Suprisingly, there’s nothing in the city chapter of The Language of Light and Dark about photographers walking the city, and photographing, even though it is very clear from Mark Strizic’s photographs that he made his photos whilst walking the streets and laneways of Melbourne. The close association between photography and psychogeography in the new urban forms of industrial modernity, which has its roots in the European flaneur/flâneuse tradition, is missing. Nor do Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, the latter’s Arcades Project, his critique of progress in the light of the experience of the twentieth century, or his account of the disorienting pressures and shocks of modern life and the phantasmagoria of modern life in capitalism appear in the index of the book. Miles makes no mention of the Surrealists, the Situationists or urban drifting/dérive as a way to explore and photograph the city.
Photographs help us to make sense of everyday life and our places in it in relation to others, and they can and do contribute to the formation of public opinion about modern life. The framing and taking photographs, publishing, circulating and exchanging them also contributes to the ongoing formation of the public sphere and the public image of the city. We act on and live within the narratives of the spectacular images, with many of the consumer images that celebrate carnivalesque freedom, are reified and alienating. If the photograph in the 21st century’s digital culture is a networked image text with its transmission‐oriented, screen‐based experience, then the inference is that photography operates culturally as a public art and as a mode of communication. As such photographic images in our spectacular culture or image society can be interpreted in a myriad of ways from different perspectives and contexts.
