Urban Tomographies. Martin H. Krieger
of Cartesian philosophy that truth is systematic, the models here are French. There is the impulse to image and catalog and to archive, to be descriptive and encyclopedic, to take city life seriously and systematically—and to be aspectival and empirical. D’Alembert in the preface (1751) to d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s L’Encyclopédie tells us they had to go to the workers themselves to draw out from those workers the details of processes of manufacture and craft, and the encyclopedists needed figures or pictures to articulate and convey that information.13
We know a little about how Marville and Atget went about doing their work. They were systematic, especially Marville, following a plan provided by their employers or commissioners. Marville was likely given a list of streets that would be pierced/eviscerated and later a list of streets now reconstructed. Atget may have been commissioned to update Marville’s survey.14
Marville might have gone down a street and then up the same street, making several down- (or up-) the-street images along the way. Streets were often adjacent or intersecting, and so there were overlaps and multiple views of the same places. Atget progressed through the space in a more panoramic way, with multiple angles and overlapping viewpoints, and from the overall to the detailed.15 In effect, they were doing urban tomography, avant la lettre, providing a rich set of aspectival variations, allowing one to imagine what the street or place was like so that it could accommodate these suites of images.
City life is produced by material and ordinary circumstances. So if newspapers are to be sold, there will be vendors or vending boxes at certain corners; if there is to be worship, there must be places available for that worship. What is everyday and ordinary is as indicative and richly symbolic as is the extraordinary and unique. This is the stuff that we take as given, as natural, as background for what else we are doing. Often it is visible, and sometimes it is audible.
An urban tomography may document systems, for what is apparently idiosyncratic is in fact deeply embedded: many storefront churches, all the electricity-distributing stations, or the various firms in an industrial or manufacturing sector. (The various objects might not be intended as a system, but they function as such, for example, producing for each other as well as for end consumers.) We present the world back to ourselves, in its ubiquity and variety, so it is recognizable—even if not in the manner we ordinarily see or hear or even ignore these places and objects. Each document presents us with an aspect of the whole; we make that image or sound recording because we believe from past experience and theory it will so contribute. Yet once we understand what is going on, any particular single document does much of the work of encapsulating what we know. The very detailed and particular example or image, itself, can now make a larger statement.
There is a drama and a choreography in everyday life that give it meaningfulness, an overarching organization of plot, role, and movement: what we are up to, at various levels of detail, and how we work together. The everyday is significant; the ordinary and unnoticed has its own drama—a drama that is taken as unremarkable, until it might fall apart in pathology and dysfunction. So an analytic description of the drama and the choreography of an industry shows the materials and initial processes, the way people work together and the ways they manage mistakes, the major products, the tools and machines, the workmanship of the craftspersons, and the terminology as it is embodied in practice, much as Diderot would have prescribed. And these aspects are shown to be aspects of, aspects of a meaningful activity, say, making something, or aspects of an object or an institution.
Any story is present in several media modalities. The modalities inform each other, so that when you record in the best of surround sound, in listening to the recording you will imagine a visual image of the place and of what you are hearing. Cardiologists place themselves within the beating heart, not as novelists but as informed sensors of the heart’s functioning.
What you encounter again and again is the world in its variety, repetition, and ubiquity, where there is always more, and just when you thought there was a plethora, there is more again. In effect, we are looking at threads of the urban fabric, each thread linked to the others, so that what we see in detail up close is seen as being located within a larger context.
No generalization will erase the facticity of each image, its unavoidable particularity. The this-ness of the world exceeds its genericity.16 Tomography allows for both. If details and particulars are instances of generic notions, there are other unavoidable details and particulars that are not under the command of the generic. Hence the world is recognizable to us in its particularity, no matter how powerful are our categories and genera. This is my echocardiogram, not that of an abstract body.
In cataloging a phenomenon, the aesthetic and the compositional are in tension with the practical and the depictive. But the actual image must be all of these. So, for example, photographers for the Library of Congress’s Historic American Building Survey and Historic American Engineering Record insist that a well-composed and properly lit photograph will also be more informative and depictively effective than one lacking those qualities. The aesthetic and the practical would appear to be very much of a piece.17 The catalog and the multiple video echocardiogram are ways we insist on unity in multiplicity, that it is through aspectival variations that we know about the world and its potentials.
Rephotography as Repetition
Public health crises, war, political transformation, and natural disaster have often been occasions for the reconstruction of cities. But as insidious is the influence of economy and technology, creating new opportunities and obsolescences. Still, what is most remarkable is the persistence of the built environment (unless it is deliberately destroyed). When Charles Marville was asked (1858, 1865, 1877) to photograph the streets of Paris, it was presumably to show the before and the after: the positive transformation, the hygienic and aesthetic improvements. Marville was the official photographer of The City of Paris, and was a formal part of Haussmann’s enterprise, commissioned by the Service des Travaux Historiques. Marville’s charge was to preserve the memory of the past, rather than to regret the decision to clear away the underbrush that had grown in Paris and that made it an unhealthy place.18 Marville left a systematic suite of images of monuments, green spaces, urban furnishings (public urinals, streetlamps, fountains), and of the streets themselves, which we now might employ to imagine a way of life that has disappeared. Still, what is remarkable is how much of that earlier urban fabric remains today.
Now rephotographing past scenes is standard practice for those concerned with documenting changes in the landscape and natural resources, and this depends on there being an archive of earlier photographs. Art photographers have adapted this practice for their own purposes: Mark Klett (nineteenth-century photographers of the western United States); Douglas Levere (Berenice Abbott); Christopher Rauschenberg (Atget); and Ed Ruscha (earlier Ruscha). Jeff Wall and Eleanor Antin photograph restaged events, imagined or adapted, sometimes portrayed in earlier visual works.
Rephotography is often done with rigorous demands on being at the right viewpoint to duplicate the original photograph’s perspective, the right time of day and time of year to duplicate the shadows, and an appropriate focal-length lens to duplicate the extent of the earlier image. In summer 2008 I asked several colleagues who happened to be in Paris to rephotograph some of Marville’s images. I gave my colleagues maps and copies of the original images. They had the task of finding the right points of view, and I encouraged just a reasonably good approximation.19
Figure 4. Screen shot from http://www.usc.edu/sppd/parismarville. Photographs of rue de Tilsitt (near Place d’Étoile) by Charles Marville, 1877, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris; and by Fritz Koenig/Tom Holman, 2008, used by permission. Website by Kazuma Kazeyama. Map © 2010 Google; Imagery © 2010 Digital Globe.
The scene I have chosen (Figure 4) shows how enduring is much of this urban fabric, in part because Marville’s is an after-reconstruction photograph (~1877), and so perhaps the buildings and streets might well persist for 130 years.