Representing Place. An investigation into how photography represents place

Contents

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1 Place and Space
1.1 Place
1.2 Place and Space
1.3 Architecture and Place

Part 2 Photography and Place

Part 3 Architectural Photography

Part 4 Four Photographs depicting place
4.1 The Jewish Museum Berlin Helen Binet
4.2 Chongqing X1 Changqing Municipality, 2007 Nadav Kander
4.3 66 Frognal, Hampstead, London, 1957 Edwin Smith

Conclusion

Illustration List

Reference List

Preface

As a surveyor I have been involved with buildings and the process of building all my working life.

Photography’s ability to represent place fascinates me. Some photographs do this better than others, which made me curious to discover what aspects of a photograph are most responsible for representing place.

I have a particular interest in architecture and this has led me to highlight how architectural photography represents place in Part 4, together with a detailed analysis of two architectural photographs by Helen Binet.

Introduction

Place is an intangible concept. It is often used within geographical terminology, but the very nature of place eludes easy definition or categorization.

In this dissertation I will interrogate the notion of place, how place is differentiated from space and how a photograph represents place using examples from different genres of photography. I will take examples of landscape, urban, architectural and interiors to look in detail at the manner in which photography produces meaning and represents place.

A particular aspect of the relationship of photographic representation to place is how photography, using only the singular sense of seeing, can transform a literal reality into a meaningful representation of the multi- sensory experience of actually being in a place.

My own photographic practice is based around architectural space and place, so I will be looking in particular at the many factors that influence photographs of buildings and how they represent place.

Part 1 Place and Space

1.1 Place

Our first thought on place may be that it is a word that needs no explanation, that it is a word that speaks for itself; this may be why little has been written about place.

We all recognise a geographical place, but here I want to consider place as a concept rather than a geographical location.

As a starting point for considering the meaning of place it is useful to start with the home, because of its universal nature. Home is where we live, whereas a house provides a vessel in which we can create home. This distinction is an easy concept to grasp, a house being a space and being made into place by our habitation. I want to apply this same distinction when considering space and place later, but first let us consider what home means to us.

‘ Home is an exemplary kind of place where people feel a sense of attachment and rootedness. Home more than anywhere else, is seen as a centre of meaning and a field of care.’ (Cresswell, 2015:39). We all recognise this description of home, as a place where we are sheltered not only from the elements, but also from the stress and turmoil of modern living. A family home is a special place, more than a building, it is the receptacle of our intimacies, a place where family is nurtured and where close relatives may have been born or died.

Home acts as a container of our memories of experiences. This is why when returning to a previous home we are sometimes deeply affected by the new owner’s ‘place making’ activities, their habitation of the space, redecoration or re planning; as though our memories had been erased. The corollary of this is when some relics of our previous occupation are still in evidence and they then can recharge memories and refresh our association with that particular place. This last factor hints at how photographs work to produce meaning generally and in particular represent place.

The belief that home can symbolize place in general is promulgated by Gaston Bachelard in his book Poetics of Space, in which he considers the home as a primal space that acts as a first world that then frames our understanding of all the spaces outside. (Cited in Cresswell, 2015:39)

1.2 Place and Space

‘ Space and place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted. When we think about them, however, they may assume unexpected meanings and raise questions we have thought not to ask’ (Tuan,1977:3) This quote reveals the lack of differentiation that can be associated with these terms whereas we will see they have distinctly different meanings.

To introduce the distinction between space and place we considered in Part 1.1 a house, representing space as a structure waiting human occupation or activities to make it home and thus making place. Using this analogy of home, we can understand how place emanates from space. Pallasmaa describes what distinguishes place from space in this way:

“In order to distinguish the lived space from physical and geometric space, it can be called ’existential space’. Lived existential space is structured on the basis of meanings and values reflected on it by the individual or group, … existential space is a unique experience interpreted through memory and experiential contents of the individual.” (Pallasmaa, 2012:129)

Thus place is not so much a fixed place, a real set of parameters formed by natural elements or building forms, but is based more on the way in which we experience the world, or put another way place can occur anywhere that human activity has occurred. Space is therefore transformed into place by human presence. This presence may leave a trace for those coming after to recognise, for example signifiers of human occupation, relics, artefacts or memories in those who were in that place or have knowledge of the history of the place.

1.3 Architecture and Place

Having considered how experiencing place is a phenomenological event, I want to investigate how this applies when we experience a building: ‘ The phenomenology of architecture is the ‘looking at’ architecture from within the consciousness experiencing it … in contrast to the analysis of physical proportions and properties of the building or a stylistic frame of reference.’ (Pallasmaa, 2012:91) In other words in order to fully experience a building we need to go beyond merely analyzing the structure and do as Charles Moore and Kent Bloomer comment in their book Body, Memory and Architecture ‘ To at least some extent every real place can be remembered because it is unique, but partly because it has affected our bodies and generated enough emotions to hold it in our personal worlds ’ (cited in Pallasmaa, 2012:75) This factor is critical in how our emotional response to place helps us retain memories of our experience, so that we are informed by memories of the experience when we respond to seeing place represented by photography.

Another quality of place is its transferable properties, whereby one place by its very form can symbolise and carry the meaning and memories of events at another place. A good example of the type of building that has these qualities is a church. Almost any pre Edwardian church will be of a classical design having similar design elements such as a Nave, alter piece and rows of pews. (I exclude more modern churches as their design often mimics a communal meeting room).

Immediately you enter a church of this period you are aware of the religious meanings and values present in the symbolism of the building form. Your experience of attending services, weddings and funerals are all contained in this vessel of a place, although unfamiliar in reality, it is at the same time capable of conveying a similar meaning as the actual churches where you had experienced those services and ceremonies in the past. I will look at this example again in Part 2 when considering photography and place.

Part 2 Photography and Place

In Part 1 I established that place is not a fixed object, but a set of parameters by which we experience the world, enabling place to occur anywhere where human activity has taken place and also that place is held by us by retained memories of experience giving place transferrable properties. This phenomenon is key to how place is represented by photographs.

Photography conveys meaning from a three dimensional physical reality by offering it back to us as a two dimensional image. The photographic process carries two fundamental traits: a photograph is both a trace of the truth made by its indexical nature and at the same time a fragment rendering an untruth constructed by the photographer framing a selection of a scene. What we see when we look at a photograph is not a facsimile of reality but a trace of reality and the rhetoric of the photographer. These are the elements that result in the successful depiction of any subject and in particular place.

When we look at a photograph it is not simply a cursory visual exercise; we read a photograph in the same way as we read text. ‘ Thus as John Schwartz and James Ryan have said,” photographs are not simply looked at,” but rather they are read and are deciphered with their meaning open to a range of contingent interpretations’ (Brett,2015). Photographs have the ability to present us with the same information, signs and symbols to trigger our own deeply held memories of experiences and beliefs in order that we are able to share a similar experience to actually being in the experiential reality of a place.

In this way photographs do much more than reflect a reality back to us, as reinforced by this quote ’ This means that the world is not simply reflected back to us through systems of representation, but that we actually construct meaning of the material world through these systems [of semiotics] ’ (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001:13)

This is how photography conveys meaning about more than place but about any chosen subject. Sigmund Freud described the unconscious as the site where memories are stored until they are developed, alluding to the delay in recognition of memories…’ (cited in Brett,2016) The photograph can unlock these memories and allow us to have a dialogue with the image presented and convert the single sensory act of reading the information presented to us visually by a photograph into a multi-sensory experience.

Let’s examine the specific attributes of photography that when used together can most successfully represent place:

The photograph has the ability foremost to document graphical information recording the physicality of a place. If place is space transformed by human activity, then it follows for a photograph to represent place in the most direct way it needs to evidence human activity or signs of human activity within the place depicted.

A simple example would be a wedding venue. Photographs showing the couple being married at the venue would usually show sufficient details to denote all the information we need to recognize that particular place.

Conversely photographs can also enable us to see hidden aspects of a subject. It can reveal information which for various reasons we have not registered when experiencing place experientially. A photograph has the ability to provide additional information to us by virtue of its ability to ‘see everything’ within the frame in a non- selective way.

‘ Photography has the ability to make visible those things that with our normal real life perception, do not see. It has the ability to reveal hidden aspects that may have escaped our eye. It freezes a moment in time and can isolate an object or a detail from a general context

and make us see it anew.’ (Scott,1999:29)

Also as Bruno Breitmeyer comments ‘… some objects do not register in visual awareness simply because the viewer’s attention is consumed by the processing of other objects.’ (cited in Brett, 2016: 39).

Not all photographs achieve representation of place by including evidence of human activities, so let us consider how they convey the meaning of place in the absence of either human presence or signs of human activities.

Again using a wedding as an example: Everyone who attended a wedding, when shown a photograph of the empty wedding venue, would still relate to that place by the photograph triggering their memories of the wedding day. The image of the venue denotes the place the event happened and that in turn connotes the event itself. Photographs taken of places after an event took place are referred to as aftermath photography by Donna West Brett “photography plays a unique role in how we remember places and events that happened there … where something occurred before the photograph was taken, commonly referred to as aftermath photography.” (Brett, 2016: preface)

For the rest of us without any knowledge of the building or visual evidence of the wedding the photograph would merely show a building devoid of information that might denote a wedding. If the wedding had taken place in a church for example, then by observing a photograph of only the church we are faced with a polysemous image. A place of religious activities certainly, but the event which took place there could be one of many, aside from a wedding, for example, it could have been a christening, funeral or a regular service.

This example of a wedding venue illustrates how a photo depicts a place that we are familiar through our own experience or our gained knowledge. As we look at the image we imagine that we are experiencing the human activity.

Let us now look at how photographs represent place when we haven’t physically been to the place. Photographs representing place in this way rely on the transferable properties of place.

This is how holiday sales material often depict place. A scene of a beach that we have never seen or been to before reminds us of past beach holidays and as we assimilate the scene in the photo we can imagine that we are in it. We anticipate our visit to that place and we can possibly sense the heat of the sun while imagining we are lying on the beach.

Alan Bates comments: “Whatever the photographic coding and composition, it’s effect - if it succeeds as an image - is to absorb the spectator into the scene of the visual image, to invite inhabitation of its space” (Bate, 2015: 125). This quotation brings this attribute of photographs to the fore when considering their success at representing place. The ability to draw the viewer into the image is essential to counteract the photographs natural tendency to codify place into geometric space.

Using landscape photography as an example, this helps to explain how Ansel Adams was able to depict place in his photographs of the American wilderness. He purposely excluded all signs of habitation in the images. When you look at the photograph in figure 1 it offers a sublime vista which draws you in so that you imagine yourself to be there within the landscape and you effectively become the human presence in the landscape.

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Figure 1 The Tetons and Snake River, 1942 Ansel Adams

This then is one way a photograph can represent place in an image that excludes evidence of human activity.

Now let us turn to how a photograph can impart meaning by absence of other information.

A photograph can withhold information by framing and excluding, but alluding to what is outside the frame in the blind field, or by presenting us with visually incomplete information; ambiguities which leave space to be filled by our imaginations fed from our own cultural capital.

The photographs which capture more are those in which the very inability of the process to render things in an absolute way, leaves certain gaps, certain “rests” for the eye, which allows it to concentrate on a restricted number of objects, as Delacroix noted in his Journal (1 September 1859).’ (Scott,1999:30) Photographs rendering incomplete information would have been even more apparent earlier in photographic history when the limitations of photographic capture and reproduction precluded accurate detailed imaging.

To succeed in representing place most successfully a photograph needs to avoid direct depiction of reality and offer an image which stimulates our own memories of experiences and our knowledge of history, our cultural capital. In this way the barrier of direct depiction, whereby our thought process tends to become solely analytical, is avoided and we are left with gaps or voids for our imagination to fill.

This I feel is an important aspect of how photographs can be successful in depicting place. It is the isolation of certain aspects of a subject, the framing, selection and gaps or ‘rests’ that produces an image that has the ability to convey place as different from geometric space.

Time is another factor affecting photographic representation. One could argue that photographs stop time and that this in itself is surreal and influences our perception of an image. This is an overarching attribute of photography summarised succinctly by John Berger: A photograph, while recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what not is seen. It isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum. (Berger,2013:20)

Photography has the ability to preserve things from the passage of time: photography preserves place when place no longer physically exists. Place still resides in our memory, but it takes a photograph to recall that sense of place in our consciousness.

We are all familiar with family holiday photographs of childhood holidays in places which may have physically changed with the passage of time. If we return to the place now they have often changed in such a way as to erase the attributes that had meaning to us; so as to make things unfamiliar and they no longer represent the place you remember from childhood. A photograph on the other hand represents place as we experienced it: When you look at the photograph we rediscover place once again.

Part 3 Architectural Photography

Buildings are commonly photographed without any signs of human occupation which heightens the feeling of time being arrested. A permanence of the subject and not merely a permanent record of the subject derived from taking a photograph means that when looking at an architectural photograph there is a feeling that the building is still there in exactly the same state. This is due in part to buildings usually lasting longer than our own lifespan.

You may experience a slight feeling of disbelief when you look at a photograph of the World Trade Centre in New York and realize that in reality it doesn’t exist. Our expectation when viewing architectural photographs is that the building depicted is still there.

Now let us consider how a photograph can represent place by comparing the actual experience of being in the building to the visual experience of looking at a photograph of the same building.

There is a quote by the architect John Hejduk in which he describes succinctly how we experience architecture . ‘When we visit a building compared to all other forms of art, we are digested by the building – we have a complete body experience of the space. It is an experience where all our senses are working together’. (Binet, Harvard lecture,2015)

A photograph on the other hand can only offer us a visual representation of the building.

‘It is a different nature which speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye: so different that in place of a space consciously woven together by a man on the spot there enters a space held together unconsciously. ’ (Scott,1999:19) In this quote Scott is describing the difference between our actual ‘being there’ experience and the way the camera captures information about place. If we have a whole body experience by being there let’s see how a photograph can represent that experience in an image. It appears not by representation of the space alone, as this will merely offer a trace of the structure of the space and not the phenomenological experience of being there.

I think that precise imaging of architectural spaces can prevent a photograph from being able to convey the feeling of ‘being there’. This could be because when a photograph gives sufficient information for us to read the image by processing that information cognitively we are often left with an empty portrayal of the fabric of a building as different from our experience of being in that building. This is particularly relevant in architectural photography, where the photographs often have the intended meaning of portraying space, showing the building form devoid of human presence or even occupational artifacts that would act as signifiers of human activities.

In Part 4 we will see from Helen Binets photographs of The Jewish Museum Berlin, that place can be successfully represented in architectural photography by both recording and reducing available information in order to stimulate a dialogue between the photograph and viewer. In this way visual information provided by the photograph triggers cultural capital held by the viewer to produce a multi- sensory experience.

Part 4 Four Photographs depicting place

Now let us examine four photographs to analyze how each of them represents place in order to illustrate the theory looked at earlier. In doing so we may determine if there is a consistency throughout the examples that confirms validity of the thesis of this dissertation.

4.1 The Jewish Museum Berlin Helen Binet

These images are part of a series of photographs documenting the extension to the Jewish Museum completed 2001 and designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind.

Helen Binet is one of the leading contemporary architectural photographers in the world. She is Swiss-French and is married to an architect, Raoul Bunschotan. She enjoys an enviable relationship with her clients and is generally unconstrained by their briefs about how she can portray a given space. Clients are happy to rely on her own interpretation and it is this freedom we are seeing in the images

Binet was invited by Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the building to take photographs before the building was completed and occupied. In Figure 2 we see a raw structure, a progress photograph, a record of a building form no longer available to us in reality. In fact, for most of us we would never have been able to gain access to the building during its construction. These important factors add immensely to how we value this photograph. It is historically important and it reveals a place to us that we would not have been able to experience in person.

The photograph in figure 2 reveals the thickness of the concrete structure itself. This weight of structure symbolises the weight of history about treatment of Jews by Germans. It also has connotations of the Berlin wall which divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989, with the German Democratic Republic governing the East and the democratically governed West. Binets photograph also emphasises the jagged slits which allow light into the space and are in the form of a deconstructed Star of David, a symbol of Jewish identity. In contrast to this graphic detail almost half of the image is made up of back shadow revealing no information, reducing the overall information about the place to us, leaving a void that encourages a dialogue with the image.

Figure 2 The Jewish Museum Berlin, 2001 Helen Binet

The Jewish Museum is an interesting example of how an architectural space can signify its purpose without having any trace of occupation or artefacts that would signify human activity and history.

Let us look at the photograph in figure 3 to determine what the photograph represents and how it gives us indicators of the building’s purpose. The image depicts a severe brutal concrete structure, bunker like in its construction. The darkness in the opening reveals little about what lies beyond. This induces a natural human fear of the unknown. It could be an opening leading to a dark chamber and carries connotations of the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. The photograph emphasises the buildings monumental design and how its form tells the story of the Jews within the structure itself.

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Figure 3 The Jewish Museum Berlin, 2001 Helen Binet

Binet successfully represents this in her choice of framing, light and dark and the balance she creates between the information in the photograph that she feels is important for us to receive and the shadowy areas where we have space for our own interpretations to be expressed and complete the dialogue with the image. Firstly, the mood is set by the use of monochrome black and white photography, Binets favoured medium.

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Figure 4 Digital colour photograph of The Jewish Museum Berlin, 2016 Paul Jillard

In this case the building form is so strong the photographer’s choice of medium becomes secondary to the buildings overpowering presence, never the less the mood can significantly be changed by the addition of colour as illustrated by the image Figure 4, taken when I visited the museum.

The building itself retains its sombre brutalist form but the glow of sunlight, highlighted by its orange colour seems to change the overall mood as it introduces a shaft of light which could be interpreted as symbolising warmth and thus some ray of hope amongst all the gloom.

Binet believes that black and white images are seen differently to colour images. She believes that colour is important but it is not the way of looking at space.

Black and white images simplify the amount of information we have to process to get to the fundamentals of composition of space and the moods created by the play of light and shade. This rendition offers uncluttered spacial information that can be more readily assimilated and therefore offers clarity that colour otherwise complicates.

Helen Binet makes a telling statement

‘Ambiguity is an important element. It can create a moment of amnesia when you look and know it is not enough… Then you refer to your own imagination, to your own knowledge to create something new. Photography is so realistic it’s tough to make something out of photography to bring it to another level; because you don’t want to see the reality of everyday, you want to see something else and I think this is given by this silence.’ (Binet, 2015: Lecture)

This quote reinforces my earlier comment on reduction of visual information being an important factor in creating the void encouraging a dialogue with the image. If there is insufficient ambiguity, then the opportunity for us to derive meaning may be stifled by an overload of visual information.

In her Harvard lecture Binet acknowledges that when we visit a building all our senses are working together, so we have vision, noise, touch, smell and that she doesn’t want to compete with that experience, or simply represent architecture. She asks the question ’What can I do with my camera?’ She chooses a reductive rendering of building form. The limits of framing images, removal of any colour, the voids created by shadow. In her images there are gaps, unexplained areas where the viewer can impart their own imagination born from experience and cultural knowledge. A dialogue between the photographer’s image making and the viewer and their existing knowledge.

The other factor in these images ability to represent place is in the title itself:

‘The Jewish Museum, Berlin’. ‘Words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes’ (Sontag, 2008: 108)

Few titles are as heavily laden with modern history as this. It conveys the enormity of the subject and the events that took place. This then raises the question as to what place this photograph is representing. Beyond the primary reading of The Jewish Museum Berlin, the title encompasses the magnitude of the Jewish diaspora and the purpose of the museum which represents 3000 years of Jewish history, expanding the photograph’s representation of place beyond a singular building.

4.2 Chongqing X1 Changqing Municipality, 2007 Nadav Kander

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Figure 5 Chongqing X1 Changqing Municipality, 2007 Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander (Born Israel 1961) made a series of photographs of the Yangstze river, the third largest river in the world. The river was damned with construction starting 1994 and completing in 2009. 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages were submerged and 1.8 million people displaced.

Against this background Kander spent two years 2006-2008 photographing the river, its banks and surrounding towns and cities, most of which were newly built to rehouse the displaced population.

This photograph in figure 5, taken on a large format camera shows a sublime view interrupted by a vast bridge under construction. The cranes being used for the construction, positioned on the extremities of the arches of the bridge are dwarfed by the scale of the structure.

There is a stark contrast between the bridge with all its connotations of the relentless march of capitalism and state power to the minute figures shown fishing by the shoreline. They are there despite the incongruity of their surroundings. They are a symbol of the past ways of river life prior to the current predicament of pollution and decimation of the people’s homes and old way of life.

This photograph is in the form of the great master landscape painters like Nicholas Poussin or Claude Lorrain. The composition although calm and having grandeur carries the evident symbols of conflict. One could say the pictorial beauty is at odds with what the photograph depicts. This is a conscious play by Kander, who describes his photographs like chocolate cake topped by mustard. (Kander, 2016: Here London)

The title Chongqing X1 Changqing Municipality, 2007 has an authoritarian feel to it, the numbering of the district as X1 and the word Municipality which connotes public ownership, control and power.

This image shows us place in no uncertain terms. It contains sufficient information for us to step inside the image, to be on that riverbank, to be overawed by the bridge construction.

Yet the image also leaves space in the middle distance, in the mist or maybe smog, in the lack of colour. This absence leaves room for us to contribute our own thought, ideas and knowledge of not only China and its unstoppable growth, but our own place in the world today. This factor of absence of some major part of the information of the whole scene is Kander’s way of drawing us into a dialogue with the photograph. He stated at his lecture Here London 2016 ‘ I feel I must frustrate the viewer in not letting the unravelling of the picture being too swift’. (Kander, 2016: Here London)

4.3 66 Frognal, Hampstead, London, 1957 Edwin Smith

Figure 6 66 Frognal, Hampstead, London, 1957 Edwin Smith

Edwin Smith (1912-1971) is acknowledged as been one of the great photographers of his day. He eschewed some of the accepted conventions of architectural photography, such as the use wide angle lenses and extreme viewpoints which are used to give buildings heroic proportions.

Smith had a dislike of modern architecture and is quoted as commenting ‘The functionalism of architecture, where the value of all that does not structurally contribute... [is denied], one can see the Puritanism that the predominance of intellect in art produces, the fear of betraying warm humanity, the fear of obvious beauty’ For Smith “warm humanity” and beauty, which he often found in the not altogether obvious, were to be the touchstones of his photography.’ (Elwall 2015:12)

When commissioned to photograph this house, designed 1937 in an uncompromisingly modernist way, he chose to frame the house in its rather traditional surroundings contrasting with the architectural style.

The house in figure 6 could at first glance easily be an institutional building, a block of flats, a school or office. Smith emphases this aspect by allowing the house to extend beyond both the left and right hand framing so that we only see the central portion, alluding to the house continuing beyond the frame. The title indicates residential use by the number 66, a conventional way of identifying houses rather than larger buildings and also the location being Hampstead, which is a predominately residential area of London.

The conventional way of photographing this type of building might have been to seek an uninterrupted view from the roadside and show the building isolated from its surroundings in an iconic way. Smith instead has chosen to choose a viewpoint which appears to be from a driveway of a property situated across the road from number 66. In this way the open gates of the house behind the camera indicate the clash of traditional and modern

The photograph was taken in Winter, the leafless trees could be seen as referencing Smith’s dislike of modern architecture; that the dormant state of the trees is a symbol of a modernist architectural movement becalmed in its ascetic values and dehumanising designs.

In this photograph we see place because Smith has stood us as an observer sheltered behind someone else’s wall and gates. This image represents familiar elements of human habitation. The road, a driveway, low garden walls, trees, pavements and the building. These are the elements we register as familiar signs of suburban living.

4.4 6th Avenue at 50th Street, New York, 1978 Thomas Struth

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Figure7 6th Avenue at 50th Street, New York, 1978 Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth (Born 1954 Germany) is an internationally renowned photographer who originally studied painting at the Dusseldorf Achademy with his teachers including Gerhard Richter. He has taken many different types of photographs including deserted streets in Germany which reflect on the country in the aftermath of World War 2.

This photograph of a deserted street in New York is taken from a low, possibly eye level viewpoint from the middle of the road.

At first glance the photograph, Figure 7 has a pleasing symmetry, which attracts us to look further. The tall buildings form a tight gridded pattern with the vertical lines emphasized. There is sufficient detail in the nearer buildings to arrest the eye and also there are signs of human activity which are created by the parked cars.

The use of a wide angle lens emphasises the foreground and portrays the road as an uninhabited, even uninhabitable place. When viewing the image we enter the scene, as in John Bergers assertion that there is a natural tendency to occupy the space shown in a photograph: “When we see a landscape, we situate ourselves in it” (Berger,1990: 11)

In this particular scene, as we imagine we are standing at the viewpoint in the centre of the wide road we tend to feel a sense of unease. Naturally we feel vulnerable as if we were there in that place in reality we might face getting run down by a car. We also feel completely insignificant and helpless to influence any aspect of the world represented.

Thomas Struth explained at the 2012 Biennale Archittettura that he sees buildings in the same way as people’s faces and he sees a neighbourhood like a crowd. (Struth,2012). What a threatening crowd confronts us in this image. An inhospitable cityscape with the tall office buildings piercing the frame of the image, alluding to them being too tall to contain, even too mammoth for us to have any power over. The inhuman face of Neo Liberalism. This is a dystopian world where humankind can be overwhelmed by the machinery of capitalism.

The photograph was taken in 1978. The 1970’s saw some significant events take place in American history. Notable was the withdrawal of troops from the long running Vietnam war, in part brought about by public disquiet over the loss of life amongst the American troops serving in the war and followed by the Watergate scandal that saw president Nixon resign in 1974.

The tall overbearing office buildings in this street scene could be viewed as a metaphor for

The overblown rhetoric of American politics at the time, which was revealed to be riddled with dishonesty from the top down. This is place even though I don’t feel that I would wish to be there.

Let us compare the examples to see how they verify or contradict the thesis:

The photographs of Binet, Kander and Struth all use a combination of containing sufficient information vital to represent place, whilst also having ambiguous areas that invite our imput garnered from our own knowledge. Binet uses shadow to provide gaps of information and Kander and Struth use light and blurred ares to do the same. They are all successful in representing place.

In contrast Edwin Smith in his photograph of 66 Frognal frames does use a blank foreground of drive and road to create an area lacking information, but this holds no mystery for us as there is suffucient information to read these elements graphically when viewing the image. I would argue that this image is less effective at representing place due to the lack of visual gaps that would encourage a deeper dialogue and therefore a better representation of place.

Conclusion

Place is not defined by being a physical entity, but rather we carry place around with us in our mind. Herein lies the challenge for a photograph, which is a physical object that relies on our visual senses to convey meaning. After examining the way in which photographs represent place it seems that the photograph does not so much reflect a reality, but instead gives sufficient visual signs and symbols that have connotations that trigger our emotions and imagination to facilitate an understanding beyond reality.

This is the way photography works in representing any subject, but I would argue that to be most successful in representing place a photograph needs to use two distinctly different attributes:

A photograph can show information about a place that triggers memory of us being in that place or being in another similar place. It can also reveal some information to us that may not have been apparent from us actually visiting a place, due to our selective way of receiving information coupled with our selective memory of experiences.

A photograph also needs to give us room to search within ourselves amongst our own cultural capital. In this way we find information that we combine with the visual information in the photograph and together they form a phenomological experience of place. A photograph can do this by providing some ambiguities, some areas that offer us no visual information, voids that give us room to fill the gaps with our own knowledge.

It is this interplay between reduction of information and revealing details that trigger memories which I feel are the key to the most successful representation of place. In this way a photograph offers us the optimum fertile visual palette to encourage a dialogue to enable us to complete a phenomenological experience in our imagination.

Illustration List

Figure 1 The Tetons and Snake River, 1942 Ansel Adams Sourced from https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gvSXVFEFSfQ/maxresdefault.jpg Last accessed 28/01/17

Figure 2 The Jewish Museum Berlin,2001 Helen Binet Page 172. PARDO, A and REDSTONE, E (Eds.) (2014) Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age. London: Prestel.

Figure 3 The Jewish Museum Berlin,2001 Helen Binet Sourced from http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2015/june/18/libeskind-and-hadid-remember-their-childhoods/ Last accessed 03/04/17

Figure 4 Digital colour photograph of The Jewish Museum Berlin, 2016 Sourced from own photograph

Figure 5 Chongqing X1 Changqing Municipality, 2007 Nadar Kander Page 251. PARDO, A and REDSTONE, E (Eds.) (2014) Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age. London: Prestel.

Figure 6 66 Frognal, Hampstead, London, 1957 Edwin Smith Sourced from https://www.architecture.com/image-library/RIBApix/image-information/poster/house-at-66-frognal-hampstead-london-the-street-entrance/posterid/RIBA5312.html Last accessed 28/01/17

Figure 7 6th Avenue at 50th Street, New York ,1978 Thomas Struth Sourced from https://www.moma.org/collection/works/49296?locale=en Last accessed 28/01/17

Reference List

BACHELARD, G (1964) The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Group

BATE, D (2015) Art Photography. London: Tate Publishing.

BERGER, J (1990) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Group.

BINET, H (2016) Composing Space the Photographs of Helen Binet. London: Phaidon

BINET, H (2015) Composing Space, lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkpeFr87wOo&t=2967s Accessed: 11 January2017

BRETT, D W (2016) Photography and place, Seeing and not seeing Germany After 1945. New York & Abingdon: Routledge.

BURGIN, V (1986) The End of Art Theory Criticism and Postmodernity. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd.

CRESSWELL, T (2015) place an Introduction. 2nd edn. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

ELWALL, R (2007) Evocations of place, the Photographs of Edwin Smith. London, New York: RIBA, Merrel.

JUSSIM, E and Linquist-Cock, E (1985) Landscape as photograph. New Haven: Yale University Press.

KANDER, N (2016) Here London. 2016: Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxXQH8TIW3g&t=9s Accessed 12 January 2017.

OLDSBERG, N (2013) ‘ Shattered Glass- The History of Architecture’, Architectural Review (Dec: p.10)

PALLASMAA, J (2012) The Eyes of the Skin Architecture and the senses. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

PALLASMAA, J (2012) Encounters 1 Architectural Essays. 2nd edn. Rackennustieto Publishing.

PARDO, A and REDSTONE, E (Eds.) (2014) Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age. London: Prestel.

ROSE, G (2012) Visual Methodologies, an introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

SCOTT, C (1999) The Spoken Image, Photography and Language. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.

SONTAG, S (2008) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.

STURKEN, M & CARTWRIGHT, L (2001) Practices of Looking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

STRUTH, T (2012) Biennale Architettura. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knYRaOIgTSo&t=1013s Accessed 12 January 2017.

TUAN, Y-F (1977) Space and Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

WELLS, L. (2015) Photography A Critical Introduction. 5th Ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

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BRETT, D W (2016) Photography and place, Seeing and not seeing Germany After 1945. New York & Abingdon: Routledge.

BURGIN, V (1986) The End of Art Theory Criticism and Postmodernity. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd.

CRESSWELL, T (2015) place an Introduction. 2nd edn. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

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SONTAG, S (2008) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.

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