Photography, composition, and the ephemeral city

Abstract

Photography is ultimately concerned with the ephemeral – with capturing and preserving transient moments. As a place in constant flux, full of ephemera and the ephemeral, the city has long been an important site for photographers. Those who study the city are increasingly incorporating photography into their research thanks to changing and more accessible technologies and epistemological shifts across the social sciences. Photographs are taking on new roles and are not only adjuncts or images that serve to illustrate or support text; they are integral to varied methodologies that centre the creation of images, from participatory methods using photo‐voice to visual urban ethnographies. This paper considers how a move from illustrative and documentary style to more creative and evocative photography is changing the ways geographers compose images. Geographers are not just taking images but making them, involving themselves in a form of hybrid geographic and artistic practice. This shift involves a move from more objective to subjective framings and, in some cases, from more passive to active techniques. Taking graffiti photography as a departure, this paper explores how a hybrid geographic and artistic approach influences the composition and aesthetic qualities of images. The paper takes the reader through five compositions emerging from a study on the politics of graffiti in Norway: 1. Documentation; 2. Obstruction; 3. Abstraction; 4. Reflection; and 5. Negation. These compositions are useful in understanding the place of graffiti, one of the most contested and quintessentially ephemeral features of the urban landscape. This analysis demonstrates how a divergence from more typical representations is important in conducting critical urban photographic research, how an artistic eye is about the analytic as well as the aesthetic.

Data science for pedestrian and high street retailing as a framework for advancing urban informatics to individual scales

“…This renewed attention to walking has been driven in considerable measure by the insights that are now readily available through walking data collected from mobile devices that individual people carry as they go about their daily activities in cities (Ratti et al, 2006 ; Eagle et al, 2009 ; Sevtsuk & Ratti, 2010 ; Batty, 2003 ). These include quantitative/computational data cast by devices that rely on geographic positioning systems (GPS) (Raper et al, 2007 ) Wi-Fi localization (Torrens, 2008 ; Soundararaj et al, 2020 ), and cellphone-based localization (Hong et al, 2017 ; He et al, 2015 ), but also qualitative data that are accessible via devices that people can use to narrate their own self-reflecting experiences via audio (Anderson, 2004 ) and pedestrians' ability to use their devices to take photographs (Arnold, 2021 ) of the things that they encounter. Among the new insights that these approaches have produced are developments in emotional geography to reveal socio-emotional processes of affect in proximity from analysis of walking diary data (Curti et al, 2011 ; Dawney, 2011 ; Pile, 2010 , 2011 ) and the relationships between bodies and urban spaces (Valentine, 1999 ; Longhurst, 2005 ; Hansen & Philo, 2007 ; Colls & Evans, 2014 ).…”

Slow scholarship, the slow city, and counter-visual practices

“…First, it is always possible to “stack” a variety of trips into one—such as using a conference as a way to photograph a particular city, or as a base to make short day trips nearby. Second, inconvenience sampling can focus on just one (large) city, an intensive approach used by Arnold (2018, 2019, 2021) in terms of Oslo, or my own (care-full) work in terms of Montréal, London, and Los Angeles, which combined the inconvenient with the slow, allied to a dedication to particular places. Moreover, it might be a lot to expect academics to engage in 30-year (visual) projects—it might be more realistic to expect 10- or 15-year cycles, much like those long-term research projects that produce in-depth knowledge and specialization.…”