Photography and the City

Because the technology of photography and the rise of the modern city coincided almost exactly, both temporally and spatially, the emergence of modern visual culture is closely associated with cities and city life, and photographic imagery in all its forms is central to the field of urban studies. From the earliest experiments in the 1830s to the latest developments in digital imaging on websites, the art of photography—whether by professionals or amateurs—has become an important way that people explore, analyze, document, and celebrate the urban environment and one of the key modalities by which the modern city explains itself to itself.

In examining the relationship between photography and the city, it will be useful to keep in mind that photography generally falls into three broad traditions of practice: the aesthetic, the documentary, and the popular.

The aesthetic tradition attempted to mimic or even surpass the preexisting traditions of the visual arts, emphasizing formal composition, evocative patterns of light and shade, and the frequent use of atmospheric blurring and soft focus. The documentary tradition, on the other hand, directly followed the precedents established by the graphic illustration in the popular press from about 1850 to 1900. Some urban documentary photography was commercial in nature, producing postcard, stereoscope, and travelogue images of cities worldwide; other, mostly journalistic documentary photographs assumed a tone of committed social activism and muckraking advocacy. Finally, the popular or [Page 591]snapshot tradition of photography began as early as the 1880s, when the Eastman Kodak Company created an inexpensive system that combined an easy-to-use camera with widely available film and film processing. Today, with the wide availability of digital cameras often built into Internet-connected cell phones, an entirely new phase in the democratization of visual culture has emerged as an integral and ubiquitous feature of global-urban civilization.

“Teaching the Young Idea,” photograph by Lewis Hine, October 1908, Morgantown, West Virginia

Source: Library of Congress.