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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007KeyDelagrangeHelen Liggett, Photographic Occasions and Improbable Alliances in Urban Life
Helen Liggett, professor of Urban Studies at Cleveland State University, began her luncheon address on Saturday with a nod to the spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre, whose essay “The Right to the City” has long defined the “connection between urban life and the right to be human.” Yet this right to “renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of these moments and places” (Lefebvre 179) is currently under considerable strain from sociopolitical pressures, including the Department of Homeland Security pronouncements on what we should fear and our national inability to mediate the progress of illegal aliens toward citizenship. Liggett proposed that viewing images of the city as photographic occasions will permit us both to complicate the question, “What makes a good picture?” and to arrive at a new concept of citizenship and the “right to the city” - through the making and reading of images - as an activity rather than a status. [This presentation included dozens of photographs of cities and their urban inhabitants which worked in concert with her words to make her argument.] Images are not static. Liggett invoked both Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Nancy to argue that image-making and the photographs themselves exist in dynamic tension with their concrete subjects (the city, the people), the photographer, and the viewer. Nancy, focusing on the photographer, said that making a picture constructs the identity of both the photographer and the photographic subject. Barthes, focusing on the viewer, said that the image is constituted through the context of its viewing and interpretation. For both, then, making images is an ongoing process: “Not a single photograph to be interpreted, but a number of photographic occasions to be asserted, constructed, and inhabited.” If images are occasions for experience, then the relationship “between urban photography and the city is a series of activities” that constitute the ongoing practice of citizenship. This understanding of the photographic occasion complicates the question Liggett then asked: “What makes a good picture?” While there are many technical answers, Liggett argued that the activity of the image is key. While it is natural to think of a photograph as simply the image of object, and judge it as such on the literal accuracy of its representation, in fact the fluid relationships the photograph creates among the photographer, the viewer, and the world sets up a series of relays, of encounters and exchanges, that together define citizenship as an activity, not a status. “Images,” said Liggett,” come from particular time/spaces and they circulate back into those sites, helping to define them.” To illustrate the manner in which urban images and their world are constitutive of one another, Liggett spoke of two images of the actress Sarah Bernhardt. The first, by the well-known photographer Nadar, is arguably the “first glamour shot,” and stood in stark and effective contrast to her unflattering early reviews. In the second instance, 50 years later (in 1915), Bernhardt performed dressed as the Strasbourg Cathedral, the right image at the right time of an embattled France. Neither of these visual performances is coherent outside of the time/space in which its meaning is made. Likewise, continued Liggett, street photography creates complex “relays or exchanges between the image and the city.” The elements of chance and unexpected juxtaposition that are the essence of street photography combine to create an urban aesthetic through which street photography became synonymous with promoting the city, an aesthetic governed in part by the technical limitations of cameras and film. Thus urban images both reflect the city and help to construct it. The subject of street photography, then, is never singular, but rather “an active spatial construction drawn from the world while also influencing how we experience space.”  Flag, Photograph by Helen Liggett Using a series of images by Nader, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Smith, Harry Callahan, Roy DeCavara and others, Liggett demonstrated the unique representations of the urban conjured forth by individual photographers. Citing Lee Friedlander’s concept of “the excess of fact,” she noted that urban photographic space is more complex than an interest in a single object; photographic space leads to a proliferation of meanings, much like the complexity of the city resists easy interpretation. Street photography exemplifies the “crowded and unresolved” nature of urban life, as demonstrated in Liggett's photograph Flag. The result of this excess for the viewer is “broader, less determined zones of contact” which encourage more engagement, more participation in constructing the meaning of the image, and of the city. Over the life of an image, this excess of fact often results in arguments over what is/should be its central point. “In the city,” said Liggett, “this is called politics.” For Liggett, staged photography, while often beautiful work, is an attempt to control, or limit, the meaning of the image, both in its production and interpretation. She cited the “Heads” project of Philip-Lorca diCorcia, which through its staging and automaticity strips away the individuality of his subjects, in effect making their identity an “excess of fact.” The result is not street photography that celebrates the city and its inhabitants, but “urban experience as distance,” which disallows the possibility of “improbable alliances” that establish citizenship as process.  Soldier: Birkholz, public art billboard project by Suzanne Opton Street photography, then, depends upon the excess of fact that creates ambiguity that provides the opportunity for exchange between the photographer, the viewer, and the world. An example of staged work that celebrates the heteroglossic space of the city is Suzanne Opton’s “Soldier” project, a series of images of soldiers returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. The image illustrated here was one of a series of billboards around Syracuse. Unlike diCorcia’s work, the identity of these soldiers is central to their representation, and the oscillation between the matter-of-factness of the text and the vulnerability of the image defines the viewer’s experience. We are unsettled, and implicated, by the alliance between Opton and the soldiers that reveals their vulnerability. These images demonstrate a final characteristic of a good picture: an image that not only leaves something to be discovered, but also shows us something about the way the world is that we had not known before. Liggett’s exploration of urban photography – of individuals and crowds, in and of the city – vividly demonstrated her claim that “a good picture,” in the context of its making and viewing, both reflects and participates in the ongoing process of citizenship. Lefebvre, Henri. “The Right to The City.” Writings on Cities. Trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 63-181.
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