Urban Tomographies. Martin H. Krieger
as well as links to other of our projects. Immediately, it will have some recordings and relevant images. It may be useful to have a list of the main topics in the archive (see also pp. xvi–xvii): houses, storefront houses of worship and worship services, infrastructure including helicopter aerials, industrial streets and neighborhoods, inside industrial sites and people at work, traffic commercial strips and ethnic markets and shopping, restaurants and eateries, industrial and commercial buildings of a large real estate firm, Department of Water and Power sites, streets and behind streets, urban botany, transit and bus life, the Pico-Robertson Jewish enclave, the ports, quiet places, sound sites, events, and marches.
Chapter 1
Introduction
Tomography presents the world to us as a suite of slices, multiples that allow us to see a whole through its aspects, whether it be urban religiosity through images of many storefront churches (Figure 24) or urban infrastructure through images of a city’s electrical facilities and aerial photographs of utility corridors (Figures 17 and 19)—much as a computer-aided tomogram of the brain, ready for reading by the neurologist, shows her the brain slice by slice (see Figure 15). Or, cinematically, a composited movie consisting of fifteen submovies, each made one after the other, tiling a screen, exhibits some of what is going on in a busy section of a neighborhood (Figure 2), or a multipanel movie of the processes of manufacture in a foundry (Figure 6), each submovie made separately, is, again, much like the multipanel display prepared by a sonographer of the heart’s functioning (Figure 3)—from various angles, in various imaging modalities, ready for reading by the cardiologist. Originally many of the medical X-ray studies were done one image at a time, each image slice laboriously obtained by manipulations of the X-ray machine. However, now we as a matter of course produce suites of images or arrays of movies.
The pervasive themes here are everywhere at one time, every time at one place, causality seen not only in time but also in the spatial array of images: streetscapes, people in motion, multiples of a particular kind of activity, angiograms of links and nodes, and choreographies of work and worship. There is overlap, complexity, layering, and slices of life. The stories are cinematic in that they are time based and screen based, and may even employ the conventional devices of cuts, montage, and bricolage.1 But they are not movies as we usually understand the term, where conventional narrative rules. Here the story may be about the nature of a particular process or institution. These tomograms, slices in space and in time and in typology, are sometimes displayed as videos or motion pictures, sometimes displayed as a high-multiplicity array, and sometimes both.
Figure 2. Multipanel view of street activity on East César E. Chávez Avenue near North Soto Street, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (Figure 1A and B, #3).
You bring curiosity and knowledge about urban processes, or of physiology, to these imaging modalities, whether as an expert or as a layperson. Surely, the images are pretty, but their value lies in what they allow you to imagine about what is going on given what you see in those images and what you know already. Of course, the echocardiographer edits the images and brief videos, choosing ones that will be most indicative for the physician, but it is the physician who watches these movies, bringing to bear narratives of cardiac function, structure, and pathology. The multiple movies and images are what the phenomenologist calls “aspectival variations,” allowing the viewer to imagine a whole, a notion of what is being displayed, a process or an institution that would produce these aspects. There is an overload of information but presumably just one idea.2 Each image is indexed by the name of the aspect it displays, or its geographic/anatomical coordinates. The reader of these images can use this information to help find the images’ places in the prospective whole, employing imagination and perhaps with the aid of a display that organizes the aspectival images.
Figure 3. Echocardiogram, nine out of forty-five video views.
In doing urban tomography, I have deliberately photographed a very large number of houses of worship and industrial sites, as well as all of Los Angeles’s electrical stations. One must include so many images, so many aspects in a tomogram, for assurance that the corpus of images is comprehensive and representative and to allow for what might be called phenomenological knowledge in terms of multiple aspects.3 Moreover, the extent and diversity of the documentation allow you to take seriously displayed signs and symbols, the actual presence of these places and institutions in the city, their scriptural or technological or societal references.4 What might have been taken as idiosyncratic or without significance is now seen as ubiquitous and meaningful.
The reader might well ask, why these particular topics: churches, factories, streetscapes, aerials of utility corridors? The straightforward answer is that they follow from walking and driving the streets of my city, from discoveries made in the course of doing something else. Driving to work I eventually noticed how many storefront houses of worship there were along the way. When photographing such houses of worship, I discovered industrial Los Angeles across the street. When I walked down the industrial street photographing facades and streetscapes, I was invited in to look at the factory itself. When I asked if I might photograph other such sites, maybe one in three such inquiries was answered affirmatively. Taking the bus to work I discovered the richness of publicly hearable conversation; and, of course, cell phone half-conversations are ubiquitous. (One might ask, just what are people’s expectations of privacy?)
Eventually, I realized that I am never interested in one image or one site or one aural recording, one spectacular shot; rather, my interest is in many such sites and images. I realized that one-more is an unending temptation. And during an echocardiogram I realized that I have been doing much the same as does the sonographer, but now for a city’s phenomena.
As the chapters show, there is good reason to believe that each of these topics is rich and connected to how a city works. Work, infrastructure, and worship would seem to be fundamental components of a civilization. But what is most striking is how these topics are by the way encountered in the documentation work.
What We Might Know about a City
In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant took on the skeptical tradition that denies that we might have complete and total knowledge of the world, by making clear what we might mean by scientific knowledge. Such knowledge is a product of our faculties and their capacities, and, as important, the logic of our thoughtways. We cannot have knowledge of things in themselves, only as they are for us. There are limits to what we can know, limits to certainty and completeness. By staying within those bounds we can have scientific knowledge.
What can we know about a city and its sensorium? I am here concerned with aspects of the city that are available to sight and sound, although smell, taste, and touch often enhance those senses. It is through tomography that such knowledge is evidenced. Tomography is many slices or aspects or perspectives on the world, claiming that they are picturing the same thing, albeit from different angles. In effect, it is a claim that there is unity in multiplicity, identity in manifolds.5 Whether that tomogram is of the brain in a CAT scan or of the heart in an echocardiogram, or of the facades of storefront houses of worship in Los Angeles, what we are offered is a multiplicity of images or videos about the same thing, or so we initially believe. We employ those slices to articulate a more detailed understanding of that thing, whatever it is. We start out with a notion of that unity or identity or thing, and through that multiplicity we modify that notion so that it can more adequately provide for that variety in that multiplicity, so that the notion is more accommodating.6 We have some idea of what we are