City Air

Abstract

Abstract

Emptiness, nothingness, invisibility, air... elements that are undoubtedly both important for the evolution of the different ways  of modelling reality (in terms of perspective, depth, three-dimensionality and the relationship between objects) as well as ones whose address is both difficult and quite rare. Representing the city involves marrying the different elements making up its landscape, composed of physically present visible solid objects as well as the distance, relationship and the articulation existing among them. The formulation of these full-empty sequences will result in a particular way of interpreting the urban reality. According to this global interpretation, two trends in contemporary photography strike us as being particularly expressive, and ones that have managed to turn into authentic visual stereotypes.

Images where the roundness of scale is underlined by accumulation, and the close-up feeds into the stifling oppression of a suffocating plot that feels like it will go on until the end of time.  However, it may have an equally different outcome. Disused, obsolete spaces serving as a stage, the desolation and abandonment of a time that can only be taken on from afar are among those places that are most frequented by photographers. Our collective sensor continues storing information in increasing numbers, these empty spaces that come at us from nowhere, this invasion or theft of the air that we go on observing with uncomfortable anxiety.

It would be disproportionate to conclude that this nightmarish two-fold alternative involving choking or hyperventilation defines how urban images are being produced today. However, considering how air is the very focus of our attention, this would appear to be the precise moment to consider the correspondence between these visual creation power lines and their reflection as an urban ways of living, because if an image can be a representation of a particular perception, we should ask ourselves the reason for the perceptual causes of such empty polarity. The force of messages such as those mentioned above would  lead us to ponder the extent of how these visual topics, already belonging to the universe of mental images of collective understanding, build new ways of perceiving what is urban, both in the sense of density and in terms of disengagement.

Keywords

Architecture, photography, city, emptiness, image, representation.