ancient cities

1917. These photographs provide a visual record
of a world and a society that was even then fast
disappearing. In a sense, all the great fin de siècle
urban photographers were engaged in a similar
nostalgic project: documenting a city of memory,
an urban reality that was soon to be swept aside by
a newer phase in the history of modernity.
Photography and the
City of High Modernism
The city of high modernism is largely of the twentieth
century, especially from the 1920s onward,
and is dominated by skyscrapers, office work, and
the technologies of electricity and stainless steel.
What dawned so optimistically, of course, was an
urban century that was to suffer mightily through
the crises of worldwide economic depression, the
rise of totalitarianism, and the devastation of two
world wars.
In the 1890s, photography began to replace
graphic art in newspaper and magazines, but the
advent of motion pictures arguably represented the
most important technological advance in the history
of photography in the twentieth century. In
1878, the eccentric Eadweard Muybridge had set
up a series of cameras to scientifically record the
gait of a horse in motion. Then, in the 1890s, both
the American Thomas Edison and the French
brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere created “movies”
and began the business of distributing and
exhibiting them to mass audiences. The history of
photography—most especially the representation
of the city in photography—had taken a major
step forward.
Perhaps the single most characteristic image of
the twentieth­century city is the cinematic establishing
shot that identifies the locale of the story
about to unfold in a motion picture entertainment.
In Metropolis of 1929, German director Fritz Lang
used a fantasy vision of overwhelming skyscrapers,
with airplanes flying between them, to introduce
his narrative of urban class warfare. In some
respects, the image resembled the revolutionary
modern towers of Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow,
which the French architect published in 1924. The
classic high­modernist image of the Manhattan
skyline has always been used to represent New
York in cinema, at least since King Vidor’s The
Crowd of 1926.
Photography and the City
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In still photography, the aesthetic tradition followed
the lead of the fine arts. As abstraction and
cubist formalism took over from realism and
impressionism, the artistic photographers often
abandoned subject matter entirely, or at least rendered
it secondary in importance, in the attempt to
capture images of pure form and underlying structure.
Even in urban photography—pictures like
Charles Sheeler’s “Ford Plant, Detroit” of 1927,
with its dominant crisscrossing of conveyor belts,
or Hungarian constructivist Laszlo Moholy­Nagy’s
“From the Radio Tower, Berlin” of 1928, with its
exaggerated aerial perspective revealing only a
geometric pattern below—the values of formal
structure and pictorial composition overwhelm the
urban–industrial subject matter. Similarly, the
cover of the first issue of Life in 1936 was an
almost purely cubist image of the Fort Peck Dam
in Montana by Margaret Bourke­White.
The interest of the aesthetic urban photographers
was not solely in formal composition and
abstraction. Berenice Abbott produced photographs
of New York storefronts strikingly similar
to those of Atget, and Bourke­White took many
street scene pictures, including the extraordinary
“Breadline in Louisville” of 1937, showing people
waiting for food in front of a billboard proclaiming,
“The World’s Highest Standard of Living.”
But the documentary tradition took on a life of its
own during the 1930s and produced some of the
real masterpieces of twentieth­century urban
photography—for example, Manuel Alvarez
Bravo’s documentation of the people of Mexico
City or James Van Der Zee’s images of the unique
combination of oppression and glamour in the
African American community of New York’s Harlem.
Responding to the Great Depression in America,
photographers in the documentary tradition
focused on poverty, often rural poverty. Walker
Evans, who had photographed street scenes in
New York during the 1920s, joined the Farm
Security Administration and depicted the povertystricken
lives of Southern sharecroppers in photographs
that were published, along with a text by
James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1939). Also working for the Farm Security
Administration was Dorothea Lange, whose pictures
of Dust Bowl migrants helped visually define
the experience of a generation whose story was told
by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. All