Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

The street, where the drama of modern life unfolds, has captured the imagination of critics of modernity since Baudelaire wrote his “Painter of Modern Life”. By presenting the character of the flâneur, Baudelaire reveals the beauty in the ephemerality of the kaleidoscopic landscape of the city. Likening the gaze of the flâneur to the street photographer, Susan Sontag in her “On Photography” called the camera’s eye voyeuristic, ultimately futile, capturing only the past’s “paper phantoms”. This essay, however, looks to street photography as valid documentary evidence that narrates the minute temporalities of urban life, at once embodying the Impressionistic quality of Constantin Guys’ sketches and the allegorical quality of Baudelaire’s poetry. To this aim, the essay takes the case of two women photographers who rendered New York’s changing cityscape material through their photos. Turning her gaze onto a New York being forged anew by the effects of the Great Depression, Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” tells the story of the metropolis by exposing the liminality of the urbanscape as witnessed on the street. Her careful documentation shows an attentiveness to the city, its past, and its rhythms; a love shared by Vivian Maier, a photographer from the 50s. In Maier’s intimate portraits of street life is clear the theatricality of New York. If to Abbott, it was the buildings that narrated the city, to Maier it is its inhabitants. The photos by these two women studied together document change through their similarities of setting, and also highlight the realities of living in the dizzying metropolis through two specific moments in the city’s history. The essay thus makes an argument for the unique and unexpected perspectives that photographs can open, by disclosing to the reader the multiple, often hidden narratives of the metropolis. It hopes to show that while mute, photographs are never silent.