Photography and the City Conference

UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies

Venue: The William Jefferson Clinton Auditorium

Conference Report

29th June - 1st July 2006

This international conference brought together 90 scholars and practitioners to examine historical, cultural and technical aspects of the relationship between the city and photography. We were fortunate to have sunshine and enthusiastic discussions throughout the event.

Plenary speakers included Peter Hales (photographer, University of Illinois Chicago), Camilo Vergara (photographer) and Paul Seawright (photographer, University of Wales College Newport). The conference was organized to coincide with an exhibition of Camilo Vergara's work, 'American Ruins' at the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar Dublin. The exhibition put together by Tanya Kiang and her team at the Gallery of Photography, was launched on the evening of the 29th June and was well attended by conference delegates. On the evening of 30th June many delegates attended a screening of the film Rear Window in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, an event espeically run to support the conference.

The plenary speakers all impressed with stimulating presentations, Peter Hales opened the conference with a wide-ranging commentary on 'centrifugal cities', examining the history of photographic representation of cities with particular emphasis on the relationship between urbanity and urban form. The American photographer Camilo Vergara presented a lively, illuminating commentary on his current project on Camden, which is extending his renowned work on blighted cityscapes into a virtual format. The Irish photographer Paul Seawright provided a fascinating commentary on his own work, charting his interest in urban spaces and especially border spaces, from early images of Belfast through to current work on African cities.

The panel presentations provided rich comparative perspective on urban and visual issues, displaying a broad concern with the heterogeneity of urban visual culture. Together we explored multiple roles photography has taken on in relation to the city - as document, witness, survey, archive, ethnography, advertisement, artifact, and more. A key theme was the relationship between photography and urban change and many papers examined how photography contributes to the production of urban space, documents the emergent morphologies of urban development (including the indeterminate spaces that lack morphological definition, so called non places or terrain vague) and refers to broader shifts in the visual economy of the city. The affinity between photography and urban change has as much to do with time as space, for it foregrounds the temporality of modernity as a process of creative destruction and a number of papers addressed the visual dialectics of urban change (decline/regeneration) and the aesthetics or urban ruin.

Issues of urban identity and community were also paramount and there were many contributions exploring the role of photography in the mediation of the relationship between urban form and social value - these drew attention to how photography shapes issues of identity, place and citizenship within the city; how it documents urban otherness (that of homelessness, or of tourism, for example); and how it archives urban memory- this is also to say that these contributions drew attention to the aesthetic, ethical and socio-political issues compacted in the act of 'photographic seeing'

These issues were also present in the papers that paid close critical attention to the aesthetics of urbanity, especially to the erotic and spectacular variety of street life but also to the technical and ideological forms of urban surveillance that shadow the desire to make the city legible.

The hum of conversations throughout the conference was evidence of the high level of interest and engagement by all taking part. We thank all participants and look forward to keeping some of these conversations going through future communications and ongoing research on photography and the city.

Listen to the interview with Camilo Vergara as recorded for RTÉ Radio One Rattlebag Arts Programmeand broadcast on the 4th July 2006

Paul Seawright's image of the Bogside in Belfast