Unmapping the City

Description

Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator, and artist based in Derby. His recent publications include Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing, also published by Intellect.

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Photographie
• Photographie
• History of art
• General officer
• Art
• General
• History
• Architecture
• Histoire des arts visuels

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 27 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841504513
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Un mapping the City
First published in the UK in 2010 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2010 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2010 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Integra Software Services Typesetting: Holly Rose Images: Alfredo Cramerotti Image editing: Colin Bowers Editorial collaboration: Yesomi Umolu Cover image: Alfredo Cramerotti, untitled sequence (2006-09), courtesy the author. ISBN 978-1-84150-316-5 Critical Photography Series ISSN 2041-8345
Printed and bound by Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth, Wales.
Un mapping the City
Perspectives of Flatness
Edited by Alfredo Cramerotti
Cont ents
Foreword 1
Unmapping the City: Perspective of Flatness_Jonathan Willett
A Middleword _In s Moreira
Bibliography
Fore word 1
The Editor to the Reader
I understand photography as the concrete manifestation of cultural, interpersonal and technological conditions: it is not a matter of representation, documentation or abstraction. It exemplifies an approach to contemporary life that is as vast and ungraspable as the processes of globalization - of which it is an important factor due to the propagation of the image as commodity - and the textures of personal relations, which it increasingly facilitates.
In short, it is not about you and me, but we . The way we live now, no matter where; the food we eat; the money we trade for goods, and the desire we build for both. It deals with aspirations to real life and the lack of definition we have for this. In fact, photography is better discussed in terms of what it is not. It is not about commerce, art, journalism, law or history. It transcends all this. The way we are embedded in photography on a daily basis, as agents or receivers, willing or reluctant, is astonishing. You, I and we cannot avoid it, like we can t avoid economics, politics, conventions or laws. Written or spoken, imagined or applied, or refused, photography embodies what it is to live today.
Photography constitutes itself as it takes place, over and over, in every corner of the planet, so perhaps there is little sense in identifying photographic genres. It is, quite simply and endlessly complexly, the common substrata of our daily experience. Critical Photography embraces this idea and aims to enter into a mutual relationship with other systems of our existence. The written world, for example, is not only a language but also a way of constituting ourselves and our communities, as are all the images we produce and consume through cameras. Photography and critical writing are placed in proximity. Occasionally they intersect - and when they approach a common topic this is obvious and productive - while elsewhere they may be tangential or even totally divergent. That is fine. Paraphrasing John Dewey, one learns not only by doing, but also by forming and elaborating the idea of what he or she does. This is an important aspect of photography, as it affects our very existence through ideas and practices. We may be enriched or disempowered but never unaltered. And the reception of both photography and writing, too, is a condition of their production, the potential to intervene in and alter life.
The first volume of Critical Photography has developed from this consideration, and deals with the life in the city. It is concerned with the living in and acting out of that which is designated urban; it examines the ongoing interactions between cognitive perception, physical wanderings, organic inhabitation and cold examination. It dissects the content that is in fact form, which turns out to be context. Particular to the urban environment, photography marks constant acts of translation between the multiple narratives in which we are entangled. So let us start from here.
Alfredo Cramerotti, Editor
Unmapping the City
Perspectives of Flatness
_Jonathan Willett
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)
We erect our structure in the imagination before we erect in reality
- Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867)
The Art of Critical Practice
A critical photography series will inevitably draw upon a wide spectrum of critical traditions in theorizing the complex relations between image, text and social practice. The assemblage of photograph and critical analysis is designed to produce a dialogue between knowing and seeing, a differential space where two systems of representation work not to determine each other but to expand a common horizon of possibility for photographic practice. The philosophical antecedents of the critical perspective can be found in Kant s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where mental structures are said to precede our experience of the world, as a basis for knowing how we come to know about things. De Certeau argues that in The Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant identifies an art of thinking a practical knowledge (1988: 72) in the relation between the art of operating ( Kunst ) and science ( Wissenschaft ), or between a technique ( Technik ) and theory ( Theorie ) (ibid.: 72). The Kantian channel (Foucault in Raunig: 2008) in European Modernism has given rise to numerous critical philosophies, which themselves go beyond Kant s model for investigating the subjective limits of knowledge. Operating within the Kantian channel Gerald Raunig re-evaluates Foucault s lecture What is Critique ? (1971) to suggest an art and technique of the critical project as an effective poetics of social action, a productive mode of aesthetics emerging in spaces of re-composition and invention (Raunig: 2008); a place occupied by the resistant image in the art of the critical photograph.
This emphasis on the transformative power of thought resonates with Karl Marx s (1818-83) famous dictum The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it (Marx: 1845), a material praxis that offers an understanding of the individual s subjectivity as the product of a collective social and historical situation. In Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) Marx adapts Hegel s dialectical method to his philosophy of historical materialism, which argues that consciousness is determined by the socio-economic realities of work in the newly industrialized cities of modernity. Marx introduced philosophy to the political struggles of everyday life, and in the process provided the basis for the critical tradition in the social sciences. The critical theory that we associate with the establishment of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1923 has its origins in revisionist Marxist thought, and in particular the sociology of Max Weber (1864-1920) and Georg Simmel (1858-1918). Simmel s essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) develops an early critical perspective on the urban experience of modernity by analyzing how the individual forms a sensory relation to the city, and in turn is reconstituted as the fragmented, alienated subject of modern life. Simmel s writings influenced the urban sociology of the Chicago School, in particular the work of Robert E. Park (1864-1944) who saw the city as a kind of laboratory for mapping the social ecologies of the urban environment. Contemporaneous with the Second Chicago School were the urban photographs of Harry Callahan (1912-99) who taught at the Institute of Design, Chicago from 1946-61. Callahan s images are the equivalent of Simmel s alienated perspective, their geometric repetition emphasizing the formal composition of the image [ ] even to the point of distortion and beyond (Rexer 2009: 103); the critical photograph reflecting the topographies of the modern city.
The social historians and philosophers of the Frankfurt School re-interpreted Marxist thought in modes of critical theory capable of apprehending the mediatization of life in metropolitan cities; with emphasis on the power of the image as ideological surface and cultural interface in the visual economy of capital. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) in particular, saw a cultural convergence between politics and aesthetics, and sought to illuminate the dialectal character of images.