ancient cities

594 Photography and the City
these images of rural poverty had clear implications
for urban life. The urbanization process has always
been driven by rural­to­urban migration, and Lange
made that point with special force by using the title
“End of the Road: The City” for the final chapter
of her book, An American Exodus (1939).
In the 1940s and the postwar 1950s, photography
adopted a gritty, cynical attitude toward
urban life. In cinema, this was known as film noir,
and in still photography, no one embodied the
noir sensibility more than the photojournalist
Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Weegee took flash photographs
of dead bodies, crash victims, and horrified
onlookers, which he freelanced to newspapers
and weekly tabloids. Some of his best work was
published in 1945 as Naked City, an extraordinary
collection of images that revolutionized the
art of street scene photography. Many of the great
urban photographers of the second half of the
twentieth century—notably Diane Arbus and
Richard Avedon—found inspiration in Weegee’s
unique vision.
In the postwar years, the popularity of television,
with its combination of entertainment, news,
and advertising seamlessly intermingled, replaced
movies and newsreels and vastly increased the
reach of urban visual culture, bringing it inside the
home in a way that had never been imagined
before. At the same time, central cities began to be
rebuilt after years of wartime devastation and
neglect, but a new kind of city was also developing
in the postwar years—a new kind of middle­class
suburban land use pattern that was to transform
the urban landscape, first in North America and
then other parts of the world. Middle­class suburbia,
however, attracted little serious attention from
either the aesthetic or documentary photographers.
Suburbia (1971) by Bill Owens presents images of
bland cul­de­sacs, housewives in curlers, and
empty rooms with TV sets left on that fails, perhaps
purposely, to engage the humanity of the
suburban environment. Most other images of suburbs
tend to be aerial images of sprawl uniformity
or street­level views of cookie­cutter houses that
dismissively tend to deny any complexity or
nuance to the lives of suburbanites.
If both the aesthetic and documentary traditions
in urban photography seemed to weaken as the
century came to a close, the popular tradition grew
stronger and more ubiquitous. Millions of people
had taken up the hobby of photography to document
their families and communities. In the end,
twentieth­century popular photography created a
kind of snapshot democracy that liberated visual
imagery from the professional elites in both journalism
and the arts. Today, collectors and researchers
ponder the albums full of photographs that
document the otherwise anonymous millions of
ordinary citizens who lived their lives as the great
events of history unfolded. Sometimes, their photographs
record aspects of those great events—
soldiers coming home from war, families moving
into postwar housing or watching television as
men walked on the moon—but the perspective is
usually distinctively different from the work of the
professional photographers. The popular tradition
in urban photography is intimate, direct, and
free of pretense. Perhaps no single image has any
great significance, but collectively, they reveal the
lives of individuals and communities from the
inside out.
Visual Culture in the Postmodern City
In the still­emerging postmodern city, many of the
distinctions that characterized modern urbanism
began to dissolve. At the local level, public space
became increasingly privatized, and the relationship
between suburb and central city changed as
more and more business enterprises and cultural
facilities moved away from inner­city locations
and created a new kind of urban place, which the
journalist Joel Garreau called “edge city” and historian
Robert Fishman termed technoburbia. At
the global level, there was a complete international
restructuring of the relationships between cities
and nation­states, driven by a new technological
order based on computer­based telecommunications
and a globalized economy. Those same technologies
of communication became highly
personalized with the advent of desktop and laptop
computers and globally networked cell phones.
People could now belong to and interact with
online communities with people from all over the
world. Urban life began to enter, at least partially,
the realm of virtuality.
In postmodern urban photography, the popular
tradition becomes triumphant. In cities where
whole buildings have become electronic billboards,
photographic artists and photojournalists are more