As is often the case with the present course material, any discussion of a given subject seems to set off a number of different connections, resonances, and issues that are ostensibly unconnected. The subject of the city here does precisely that for me.
I have not lived in a city for the last fifteen years or so and I find them increasingly to be alien and sometimes uncomfortable environments; I see that in the next section on psychogeography is going to look at the city as a means of making work and I anticipate that I am going to find that challenging. Living in the country I find myself increasingly distanced, not just physically but also mentally and emotionally from the city. I go into Newcastle only once a month or so. Very few other cities are now graced by my presence: Edinburgh once or twice a year at most (incidentally, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me Edinburgh is the one city in which I feel more comfortable and at home despite never having lived there apart from occasional visits, in the past more frequent than now); Birmingham once every other year or so, though that is now likely to become much rarer; Glasgow and Belfast (which, like Edinburgh, I both enjoy) once in a while. London I have not visited for years (I did live there for a couple of years a long time ago and could not wait to get out!).
In photographic terms I do not find cities fertile places for making work. I have made some pictures in Newcastle for EYV and I&P but all too often, if I do not have a specific project or task in mind, taking a camera with me into the Toon is a waste of time (though it still does not stop me, just in case). I know that many people find the views along the Tyne of it bridges, for example, appealingly picturesque, but I am afraid this does nothing for me and they are not what I want to photograph. Part of the issue here might be, I suppose, that living and working in Newcastle over a period of thirty-odd years, this is what I saw very working day so it all became rather mundane and just part of the background.
Most of what I do make is local; if not within walking distance then no more than a short car ride away. In this regard it was interesting to note the comments in the material on Fox Talbot staying close to home for his better work. I certainly feel a lot more engaged and focused locally.
The other thing that caught my attention is the reference to Paul Seawright. I thought the name was familiar and of course he cropped up in C&N (https://markrobinsonocablog2cn.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/project-4-the-gallery-wall-documentary-as-art/). There are a couple of points that flow from this.
In that earlier post I wrote about the illusory distinction between documentary and art photography and argued that the one does not necessarily exclude the other. The same can be said here about, for example, landscape and documentary. His Invisible Cities work is both. I feel that any attempt to distinguish between the two in work such as this would be forced and unsustainable. That is very much how I feel and have argued right from the start of this course. As should be clear by now I find the more straightforward ‘picturesque’ approach to landscape photography uninteresting, unappealing, indeed quite sterile. For me the more interesting work is that which operates at other different levels as well. Invisible Cities certainly does that for me, as does, to take just one example that I have been looking at recently, the work of Mitch Epstein that I have already mentioned in connection with this module, and at the end of I&P.
I am also intrigued that apparently the title of this body of Seawright’s work is “appropriated” from the eponymous novel by Italo Calvino, a fabulous book that I am shocked to discover, on looking at my copy of it, I first read nearly thirty years ago! What is intriguing to me is the choice of this title. Although the novel is, at face value, a series of descriptions of cities visited by Marco Polo on his travels, it is of course a description of just one, real, city, Venice. The locations of Seawright’s pictures are not recorded in their captions. Is he, as Calvino, depicting the same city, while giving the impression that the work covers and derives from many? Is a single city being used to stand as a model for many? Or are a number of places being used to depict a sort of idea of a Pan-African city, not really an ideal but a sort of visual synecdoche? Is he, in line with his thinking behind his other work, simply leaving open an interpretative space for the viewer to occupy and inhabit? This sort of complexity, indeterminacy, gives an even richer, denser, more interesting flavour to what might otherwise be seen as rather deadpan work, which makes it all the more appealing to me.
Calvino, I, (1974). Invisible Cities. London: Picador
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 