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The Camera and the Window – the Perceptual Base

for Observing the Modern City.

This essay questions the perceptual base for experiencing city streets. It considers how observation, as a heightened form of perception, provides an architect with a body of remembered places usable, while

designing, to predict and make judgements about the characteristics and qualities of as yet unbuilt and inhabited places. It will consider

observation as being more than a single attentive mode of perception but rather consciousness oscillating on a series of axes: solid or void; distanced or immersed; empty or full; technologically-led or willed;

focussed or open; innocent or knowing; raw or mediated.

It will propose observation as an artistic practice and consider it

through two apertures – the camera lens and the window onto the

street. It will explore the “perceptual base” for the experience of the

modern city and test it against experience – photo-based observations

of Glasgow’s central streets. Biography:

David Porter is Professor of Architecture and Head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. For the last decade he has been undertaking mixed-media design research into the architectural space of rooms and streets. He has been Head of the Mackintosh School since 2000 where he leads the Living Cities Project. The partnership Neave Brown David Porter Architects was founded in 1986 with housing and urban design projects in Holland and Italy. The work of NBDPA has been published and exhibited widely in Europe, the USA and Japan. He studied architecture at the Bartlett in London, and the history and theory of architecture at the University of Essex. He has taught at the Architectural Association, the Bartlett, Bristol University, Canterbury College of Art, Kingston, and the Universities of East and North London and has been a visiting professor at the School of Architecture at Aarhus.

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“…. whatever may be said about the traditional city, is it possible that the city of modern architecture can sustain anything like so adequate a perceptual base?” - Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter: Collage City 1

We start with the extraordinary acts of imagination and representation that we

call designing - acts that are played at their most demanding level in the

design of urban space. In many branches of designing a prototype is built and

tested. The urban architect does not build prototypes but draws, or builds

physical or digital models that, however realistic, seem puny in the face of the

complexity of lived experience. These images can be populated with collaged

faces as a reminder of the actuality of occupation but these are no more than

a prompt to our conscience, a reminder that the ultimate destination of our

representation is to help answer the question - “is this a good place to be”? A

question answered comparing a representation of our imagined design

against a remembered experience of being in a comparable place – of being

THERE.

The designer’s moves are these: imagine a building or place; represent it;

enter and populate the representation, then compare it with places stored in

the memory. In this final step, a photograph or sketch may help as to recall

the memory of places that give grounds for architectural judgement. But our

memory has to be ready, to be stocked and primed in advance with a library

of remembered places, a stock not casually acquired, but accumulated

through extended observation – a dogged, contrived and obsessive kind of

perception. Le Corbusier describes it this way:

“When one travels and is a practitioner of visual things, architecture,

painting, sculpture, one sees with one’s eyes, and one draws in order

to take inside, into ones history, the things that one sees.

1 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter: Collage City, Cambridge 1978, p 64.

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“Once things have been interiorised through the work of the pencil,

they remain within for the rest of one’s life; they are written there,

inscribed”.2

Into what could otherwise be seen as a mechanistic view of designing, Le

Corbusier reminds us of the miraculous complexity of design thinking and it is

this complexity, in relationship to observation, that I will explore. For the steps

I have described are not held separately in the mind - we move to and fro

between them, positioning ourselves in different ways. We talk of designing as

an iterative process, but seen close to, it is often an oscillation – a rapid

movement between different modes of thought and consciousness that lie

along different axes.

Oscillations of the Design Mind

Rowe and Keotter’s understanding of gestalt psychology is key to the central

proposition of their Collage City - that the dichotomy between the perception

of the city in terms of solid and void represents a tension between two

fundamentally different political readings of the public and private realm. They

contrast the solid of a freestanding building (such as Le Corbusier’s Unite at

Marseilles) with the void space of the square or courtyard in a traditional city

(such as that in the Uffizi gallery)3. They conclude that the “debate between

solid and void, public stability and private unpredictability, public figure and

private ground which has not failed to stimulate, and if the object building…

when taken as a universal proposition, represents nothing short of a

demolition of public life and decorum, if it reduces the public realm, the

traditional world of visible civics to an amorphic remainder….”4

2 Le Corbusier, L’Atelier de la Recherche Patiente, (Paris 1960), p37, quoted in Daniele Pauly, The Chapel of Ronchamp, in Drawings From the Le Corbusier Archive – Villas, Public Buildings, Ronchamp, Architectural Design Profile 60 1885, edited by Alexander Tzonis. 3 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City p. 68 “It the Uffizi is Marseilles turned outside in, or if it is a jelly mould for the unite, it is also void becoming figurative, active and positively charged: and, while the effect of Marseilles is to endorse a private and atomised society, the Uffizi is much more completely a “collective structure”. 4 Ibid. Page 63. They provocatively continue: “…one is largely impelled top say: so what? And if it is the logical, defensible presuppositions of modern architecture – light, air, hygiene, aspect, prospect, recreation, movement, openness – which inspire this reply.”

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1 – Collage City

The gestalt relationship between solid and void is a binary one – the solid can

be the figure and the void the ground, or the relationship can be flipped so that

the void becomes figure. But we cannot hold both in our minds at the same

moment – there is no sliding scale between the two. But in seeking a

“perceptual base for observing the modern city” there are clues in Collage City

of other related axes along which we can position ourselves as observers of

the city. The first is between being distanced or immersed in the city and,

related to this, a second: whether the void spaces they advocate are

experienced as empty space or populated place – an axis between empty or

full. Finally, the relationship between solid and void at the centre of their

thesis relies on the clarity of the boundary between the two, but softens in

conditions of half-light and rain, or when the activities in the street come to the

fore and distract attention from the formal properties of the delineated void. In

these conditions we have a third axis, our senses move from focussed to

open. And for Juhani Pallasmaa the loss of clear boundaries heralds the play

of the imagination: “In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision has to be

suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocussed

gaze.”5

The voice used by Rowe and Koetter in Collage City and their choice of

illustrations predominantly represents a distanced and aerial viewpoint.

Their’s is a vision of a city empty of citizens and with a clearly delineated 5 Juhani Pallasmaa: “The Eyes of the Skin”(London 2005) p.46.

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boundary between solid and void. We see this in their illustrations – sharp

etchings, photographs of physical models and black and white figure-ground

plans all focus on the clear formal geometric properties of a predominantly

unpopulated urban realm. An exception is one short and revealing moment

when the authors hit the streets and become immersed in the city, finding that

the interiors of rooms fronting the public street have become, through their

windows and illuminated by electric light, highly visible and public: “One walks

through the city – whether it is New York, Rome, London or Paris who cares,

but, as one mentally fills in the rest and imagines a society of unexampled

brilliance from which one is fatally excluded, one does not feel exactly

deprived. For in this curious commerce between the visible and the

undisclosed, we are well aware that we too can erect our own private

proscenium and, by turning on our own lights, augment the general

hallucination which, however absurd it may be, is never other than

stimulating.”6 This is the moment in Collage City were we walk the streets and

touch the ground, although the streets, as stage set, seem denuded of actors

and the “private proscenium” opens up a reverse spectacle of public peep-

show into private domestic worlds. It is where the clear boundary between

public and private, solid and void, become confused and blurred.

The journey from distanced to immersed is travelled by Michel De Certeau

who also starts by looking over the city from a high view-point and finds this

view reducible to “a representation, an optical artefact? The panorama-city is

a “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition

of possibility is an oblivion and misunderstanding of practices.”7

In dropping down to street level the scene is transformed from empty to full,

and the conditions for experience change:

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below”, below the

thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk, an elementary form of

the experience of the city; they are walkers… whose bodies follow the 6 Rowe & Koetter, Collage City: page 66. 7 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans Steven Rendall (California 1984), p.93.

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thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read

it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen, their

knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.

The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognised poems in

which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.

It is as though the practices organising a bustling city were

characterised by their blindness. The networks of these moving,

intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author

nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of

spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely

other.”8

If we see the formal configuration of the street at all, it is from the corner of the

eye.

Henri Lefebvre, looking through a window which opens onto one of the

most lively streets of Paris, goes further and questions vision as the

dominant feature of the scene in front of him and introduces the dimension

of time:

“The characteristic features are really temporal and rhythmical, not

visual. To extricate and to listen to the rhythms requires attentiveness

and a certain amount of time. Otherwise it only serves as a glance to

enter into the murmurs, noises and cries. The classical term in

philosophy, the ‘object’, is not appropriate to rhythm. ‘Objective? Yes,

but spilling over the narrow framework of objectivity by bringing to it the

multiplicity of the senses (sensorial and meaningful).”9

8 Ibid, p.93 9 Henri Lefebvre in Seen from the Window, from Elements of a Rythmanalysis, in Writings on Cities, translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman & Elizabeth Lebas, (Oxford, 1996) P.223. He goes on: Could it be that the lessons of the streets and the teachings of the window are exhausted and dated? Certainly not. They perpetuate themselves by renewing themselves. The window on the street is not a mental place from which the interior gaze would be following abstract perspectives. A practical site, private and concrete, the window offers views that are more than spectacles. Perspectives which are mentally prolonged so that the implication of this spectacle carries its explanation. Familiarity preserves it as it disappears and is reborn, with the everyday life of inside and out. Opacity and horizons, spectacles and perspectives, are implicated, for they become complicated, imbricate themselves to the point of allowing the Unknown, the giant city, to be perceived and guessed at. With its diverse spaces affected by diverse temporalities – rhythms.

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“Perhaps qualified to observe… “10

Observation does not come lightly. Le Corbusier’ “qualification to observe” is

his mastery of pencil and sketchpad. His medium for observation was

predominantly through drawing, representing places with both impressionistic

immediacy and analytical precision while his thoughts, and sometimes his

emotions, are recorded in vivid prose. He was famously suspicious of the

camera and in this he is in line with writers, such as Jonathon Crary, for whom

the technological apparatus used in observation do more than extend the

range of available techniques - they infiltrate and, to some degree, subjugate

consciousness. This is Crary: “most of the historically important functions of

the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no

longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real”, optically

perceived world.11” He continues:

“The rapid development in little more than a decade of a vast array of

computer graphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of

relations between an observing subject and modes of representation

that effectively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of

observer and representation”12.

“Obviously other older and more familiar modes of “seeing” will persist

and coexist uneasily alongside these new forms. But increasingly these

emergent technologies of image production are becoming the dominant

models of visualisation according to which primary social processes

and institutions function…”13

10 The phrase is Le Corbusier’s: “To draw oneself, to follow outlines, to fill up spaces, to explore volumes etc., is first of all to see; it is being perhaps qualified to observe, perhaps qualified to discover…” Le Corbusier, L’Atelier de la Recherche Patiente, (Paris 1960), p37, quoted in Daniele Pauly, The Chapel of Ronchamp, in Drawings From the Le Corbusier Archive – Villas, Public Buildings, Ronchamp, Architectural Design Profile 60 1885, edited by Alexander Tzonis. 11 Jonathon Crary, techniques of the Observer (Cambridge 1992). p 2 12 Ibid p 1 13 Ibid p 2

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There is no doubt that new forms of representation and technologies of

observation significantly influence our consciousness, but I believe we need

not so disconnected from our senses to speak of them being “supplanted”,

“nullified” and “dominated”. We are not trapped by our senses but interact with

them. On this axis, by gaining a working understanding of the media at our

disposal, we can impose our creative will to interact with the inbuilt

propensities of our means of representation.

Marshall McLuhan has a more optimistic view:

“With the extension of the nervous system itself as a new environment

of electronic information, a new degree of critical awareness has

become possible. Such critical awareness in the Western world,

critiques and discriminations of the sensory life as expressed in our

environments, has previously been the province of the artist only.14”

In other words, observation need not be trapped in false assumptions about

an unachievable objectivity, nor be at the beck and call of technology, but is

available as an artistic practice carrying with it the roles of interpretation and

representation that brings us to the final axis to be considered in qualifying the

observer. Durkheim describes this axis as between two modes of experience:

that of raw unmediated sensation and that which is mediated through

representation 15. On this axis, pure sensation is ephemeral and private, while

representation is durable and public. To design we must move between the

14Ibid, he goes on to propose that the alienated status of the western artist contrasts with that of the East, quoting ‘The Book of Tea’ by Okakura-Kakuzo: “Chinese historians have always spoken of Taoism as the ‘art of being present in the world’, for it deals with the present – ourselves…. The present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.’ 15 I owe this observation to Tim Ingold from Culture, Perception and Cognition in the Perception of the Environment (London 2000), p.157. “ Durkheim explicitly spelled out the relation between the consciousness of the individual and that of collectivity… He did so in terms of the thorough going distinction between sensation and representation. The distinction was made on two grounds. The first lies in the contrasts between the ephemerality of sensations and the durability of representations…. Secondly, whereas sensations are private and individual, representations are public and social”. (p.157-8).

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two, entering the representation with the remembered, but essentially

ephemeral, experience of place. To productively slide between the poles of

this axis, as a successful design must do, then the memory of place must be

primed. The accumulated memory of places is a result of a commitment to

observation of their characteristics, empty and full. Observation, unlike

looking, requires doggedness and persistence, acuity and obsession – it is an

artistic practice in it own right.

Imagining a New Glasgow

I have been walking through central Glasgow since the year 2000, but since

2002 I have been paying it special attention, it has become my laboratory,

where I have found myself becoming the urban observer. This was when I

was approached by Glasgow City Council to undertake an “aesthetic

appraisal” of Glasgow’s Public Realm Projects, an ambitious programme of

improvements to the central urban streetscape. In 1995, in preparation for

Glasgow to become European City of Architecture & Design in 1999, the City

determined to improve its central urban spaces. This is part of a political

strategy that uses civic space as an instrument to create a composite image

of a city that can assemble and overlay these diverse ideals: a city with a

democratic mix of public pleasure and public assembly; a city with a vibrant

multi-cultural community; a sophisticated European city; a city of style; a

creative city; a city with a unique history and distinctive character, and a

successful and competitive international city. The representation of the

composite city is not new, for as Graham Shane points out “real cities of

Serlio’s time combined all three of his stage settings in a hybrid of government

control, dynamic market and trading forces, and the long cycles of agricultural

production, marketing and storage.”16

16 David Graham Shane, Recombinant Urbanism – Conceptual Modelling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory, (London 2005) p. 22.

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To fulfil this complex political ambition, Glasgow commissioned a Strategy17

that followed a familiar format by mixing images, principally photographs, with

text. The photographs showed fragments of places, sometimes Glasgow but

also Rome, Barcelona, Frankfurt, and Paris montaged into a narrative

describing, or at least evoking, a composite “New Glasgow”. It was used to

help form a shared vision with glimpses of what the New Glasgow might look

like, and it served as a guide to brief designers to turn this vision into a

constructed reality.

2 – the Composite “New Glasgow”

In my “aesthetic appraisal” I treated the Strategy Report and its photographic

illustrations as an expression of aesthetic intention then set to the streets with

my own camera, like a detective collecting “evidence”18 to see whether the

17 Glasgow City Centre: Public Realm – Strategy and Guidelines, 1995, prepared by Gillespies for Strathclyde Regional Council, Glasgow City Council and the Glasgow Development Agency. 18 A suitable preoccupation in the City of Glasgow, the birthplace of Allan Pinkerton, founder in 1850 of the detective agency - David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity (Oxford 2001) Chapter 2 – The City Detected, and p.65.

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newly designed public works lived up to the intention. Like the Strategy

Report, my Aesthetic Appraisal followed a format juxtaposing text with photo-

image. Like a historian with a two-slide presentation, I compared places, with

photograph set against photograph, exploring differences. This was a form of

camera-based empirical research using photographic evidence.

My report was submitted but I continued to walk through central Glasgow with

a camera. After three years, I began to realise that a new project was

emerging that I am describing here. It brings together different lines of inquiry

that had been developing, until then, independently and all concerned the

problems of designing, representation, particularly photo-realistic

representation of places, against the actuality of lived place.

Camera-based Empirical Research

My camera-based research uses the camera in two ways: to explore and

reveal new aspects of the urban scene, and in a broad way, to stand for a

kind of vision: that of still photographs in particular, but also screen-based

digital representations of place. The camera is used here within a growing

critical understanding of its predilections and limits, to reveal insights, for it is

hard to see the street for what it is, particularly bearing in mind that vision is

not enough.

To progress my photography-based research, I traded my film camera for a

digital one that I could carry in my pocket and, for the first time, progressed

from a fixed-lens to a zoom. Later I found I could shoot “film” clips with my

camera, and that, to my surprise, it recorded sound at the same time. It was

only on playback that the importance of the acoustic space of the streets

became apparent.

I began cataloguing the work of photographers of streets: Atget, Brassai,

Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson and Brandt whose work, taken together, constitutes

a recognisable genre that flowered in the European city between the

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beginning of the 20th century and post-war reconstruction. Their work portrays

the melancholy emptiness of cities aged and aging, often early in the morning

or in slight mist, where each paving stone is worn smooth and the walls of

buildings are patinated. These are images of a predominantly empty city,

given scale by the worn cobblestones, layered in history, waiting to provoke

nostalgia, redolent with what we would now call a “sense of place”. Their

emptiness invites us to nostalgically inhabit the images that exemplify a once

lost and now deeply desirable urban realm and makes explicit the power of

the camera to aestheticise the empty, with its sensuous surfaces reflecting

light back to a grateful lens.

3 – Atget’s Paris

The second line of enquiry goes back some twelve years to the time when I

left practice to become a full time academic. I spent a period designing

architectural fictions expressed in large-scale physical models that I built then

repeatedly and obsessively photographed. This was a largely intuitive form of

camera-based empirical research exploring certain qualities of light and

volume through the camera lens, trying to find the limits to the photography of

models19. I was almost climbing into the model, getting “too close” and seeing

19 These models were exhibited at the Heron gallery in London in 1998.

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perspective collapse as the three dimensional cues slipped outside the view

of the lens or were lost in the verge of darkness or overwhelmed by light.

4.1 – 4.4: experiments with camera and model – closer and closer, entering the space of an architectural model with a camera. David Porter, 1996-1995

Finally, working with colleagues from the Digital Design Studio at the Glasgow

School of Art, we have the contract to build a three-dimensional photorealistic

model of central Glasgow (the same streets that I have been photographing)

to be used as a planning tool. The model is being assembled through photo-

based scanning of the city as it stands now, and the image quality is quite

remarkable: for example, it is possible to differentiate between a front door

that is dirty and one that has recently been painted. It is a composite vision,

with “real” pieces taken over one year, montaged into a composite city.

5 – Glasgow Digital Model – Photo-realistic, Digital Design Studio, Glasgow School of Art, 2006.

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In each of these lines of inquiry, the camera lens stands for the eye, and

vision for the sensory perception of a place. The camera is not a neutral

instrument, seeking phenomena to be identified and measured. We can

analyse the photographic evidence but in doing so we are also analysing the

role of the observer. For carrying a small camera is one thing, but being

aware that there is a camera in your pocket is another. It changes the way the

street is viewed and the choice of paths walked. The decision to stop, take it

out and shoot creates a self-conscious separation from the others in the

street, who then become part of the chosen scene. At this moment there are a

range of aesthetic choices to be made, in a more or less conscious manner,

about the framing of the shot and the particular moment to be captured. The

idea of photography enters in: that the camera has its own eye that enters a

dialogue with that of the photographer.

6 - Central Glasgow – Buchanan Street on a Saturday

I am in Buchanan Street, Glasgow. It is incontestable that, as an architect, I

look at the scene in a special way. Can I be a disinterested observer, taking in

the world through my senses, raw, without composing the image, framing the

view, and seeing the world as if through a lens? For sure, I can never be free

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from the deep-set reactions that, in effect, mediate what I observe. I may not

be a camera, but my eye cannot forget that I have used one and I find myself

framing a view. Trained as an architect, I can look at the street as a

geometrical projection. I accept that the way by which I see has been

influenced by the means of representation and production that I learned in

becoming an architect20. So I can impose a vanishing-point and pull the scene

into perspective. But then I can let the perspective dissolve, walk on and go

shopping. In the space of a moment I have been two people: photographer

and architect, but I am now also a shopper.

If we consider shopping as an example of what Michel de Certeau calls

“everyday practices - ways of operating - or doing things”21 then I have three

modes of practice in that street, each mediating my experience, two of them

expert and one everyday. The expert practices are characterised by specialist

techniques for representing the world, such as architectural projections and

perspective, learned through the acquired skill of drawing. We do not need to

carry drawing instruments with us to interpret our senses through them. The

memory of learning through these instruments, engrained in hand and eye,

helps us to construct our imagination, it’s potency and its limits.

Each mode of representation has an aesthetic dimension, a charge that in

part comes through the cultural context in which we learned its rules and

application, and part through the resistance that each medium shows to being

20 A proposition explored with subtlety and depth by Alberto Perez-Gomez & Louise Pelletier in “Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge”, (MIT 1997), and Robin Evans who presupposes geometry as at the heart of the architect’s vision, that we see through drawing: “Composition, which is where the geometry in architecture is usually sought, may still for convenience be considered the crux of the matter, but it has no significance in and of itself. It obtains its value via the several types of projective, quasi-projective, or pseudo-projective space that surrounds it, for it is only through these that it can be made available to perception. That is the thesis of this book”. From the introduction to “The Projective Cast”, Robin Evans, (MIT 1995). 21 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, 1984. From the Introduction.

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at the will of the creator. The pencil on paper seems to have a certain will of

its own, as does the viewfinder of a camera seeking out a view.

I can aspire to Zen mastery, emptying my mind of voices and images to

simply be there, in the street, soaking up its presence. There are sliding

scales of different types of attentiveness and we can learn to place ourselves

on them. We experience the world, not as a mass of sense data, but through

ways of seeing and representing the world. We can experience the world

through different eyes and with a different perspective, and can change mode

again and again in quick succession – architect, photographer, shopper. Our

manner of seeing is influenced by practices learned manually and internalised

into the deep core of memory. The specialist practices of representation carry

with them an aesthetic charge both explicit and implicit.

7 - Urban actors – Central Glasgow

The role of the actors rather than the stage set became more important. I also

became more cautious about accepting the overstated claims about the

“hegemony of vision22”, for clearly, walking down a busy street is a multi-

sensory activity. The idea that new digital means of visualisation will “nullify

most of the culturally established meanings of observer and representation”23

22 Influenced by Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision edited by David Michael Levin, (University of California Press, 1993). 23 Crary, The Techniques of the Observer, p.1.

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seems to be an equally over-blown claim for surely the brain is subtle enough

to glide from old modes of vision to new ones, and from vision into the full

sensory gamut? For I have spoken of vision, not to exclude the other senses,

but through the limits of language. There is no proper way of explaining that

seeing is partly done with the ears and with the motor reflexes of the muscles.

To say that we “sense” or “experience” the street sounds clumsy when it is

self evident that all the senses are engaged in what we could call “seeing”.

My own photographs have not been carefully framed and composed nor is

there artfulness in capturing the actuality of a particular moment. The genre of

photography that I called “the European city of melancholy” impresses me,

both in its beauty and in conjuring up of an urban dream of place, but there is

little evidence here of seepage into the ambience of my photographs. The

tactile quality of the stones, kerbs and walls is largely absent and there are no

subtle combinations of light and shade, texture, surface and form – to trap the

mystery of a place.

It would have been logical to expect these photographs to be dominated by

perspective coming to the image from two directions. The first being from the

history of the street in the European urban tradition, which is inextricably

linked to the history of perspective. The second being the construction of the

camera, with sight lines converging through the vanishing point of the lens to

be then projected at the back of the camera on a screen. The expectation of

perspective would be heightened further in that the urban design of Glasgow

from the 18th and 19th century, as Britain’s only gridiron city, gives long

straight vistas, often terminated with a major public building as “focal point”.

Do the straight streets and the camera collude in a tyranny of perspective?

From observation the answer is, sometimes yes but often no with many

grades in between. When the streets are empty, and there is no rain or fog,

the camera seeks out the street’s vanishing point, and then the answer is yes.

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When empty and the light is clear, the paving slabs give a sharp definition of

the ground plane, its scale, a sharp junction with walls, and an understanding

of how the floor plane recedes. All of this underpins the perspective view.

But when the street begins to fill, whether it is with people, mist or rain, then

the presence of perspective recedes; the ground plane is progressively lost,

perspective softens and becomes subsidiary. On days like those of political

marches, the shape and direction of the crowd hold the perspective view, but

it is one of a mass of directed variables, not marked out with the clarity of

projected lines. There is a looser crowd form seen at its height each Saturday

in central Glasgow; the playing out of one the city’s great passions –

shopping, equivalent to it’s other great passion - soccer, in attracting crowds

on a huge scale who fill the urban spaces in a loose but tangled sense of

togetherness. Elias Canetti’s taxonomy of crowds applies24, and looking at a

sea of shoppers, his list of “crowd symbols” – that is, “the names of collective

units which do not consist of men, but which are still felt to be crowds”, comes

to mind: Fire; Sea; Rain; Rivers; Forest; Corn; Wind; Sand.

8 – the crowd, Glasgow, Buchanan Street, Saturday.

As the street empties again vision becomes more like that of a camera as the

scene slips back into perspective. But as the street fills, we scan across the

faces and do not seek the vista.

24 Elias Canetti, Crowds & Power (in German, Hamburg, 1960, in English, London 1962), p.87

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Am I a Camera?

I want to finish with two early modern views of the street. The novelist

Christopher Isherwood, is looking out of his Berlin window in the autumn of

1930 and, in addition, emphasises his claim to an “new objectivity” by

imagining seeing through a second aperture, the camera lens:

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not

thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the

woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday all this will have to be

developed, carefully printed, fixed”.25

In contrast, the view of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, does not feign

objectivity and, importantly, is not “fixed”. He begins by considering two

modes by which phenomena can be experienced – internally and externally,

and associates these modes of consciousness with the physical oscillation

between being inside the building while observing the street outside, and with

to being outside immersed in the sensations of the street.26

“The street can be observed through the windowpane, which

diminishes its sounds so that its movements become phantom-like.

The street itself, as seen through the transparent (yet hard and firm)

pane seems set apart, existing and pulsating as if “beyond”.

“As soon as we open the door, step out of the seclusion and plunge

into the outside reality, we become an active part of this reality and

experience its pulsation with all of our senses. The constantly changing

grades of tonality and tempo of the sounds wind themselves about us,

rise spirally and, suddenly, collapse. Likewise the movements envelope

us by a play of horizontal and vertical lines bending in different

directions, as colour patches pile up and dissolve into high or low

tonalities. 25 Christopher Isherwood: A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930), (London, 1939) 26 Wallisy Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, trans Howard Deans Lyne and Hilda Rebay, NY, 1979. In German as Punct und Linie zu Flache, 1947.

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“The work of art mirrors itself on our consciousness. However, its

image extends beyond, to vanish from the surface without a trace when

the sensation has subsided. A certain transparent, but definite glass-

like partition, abolishing direct contact from within, seems to exist here

as well. Here, too, exists the possibility of entering art’s message, to

participate actively, and to experience its pulsating-life with all one’s

senses.”27

Kandinsky starts from the view through the window which, as with Isherwood,

can be considered as a screen, then moves from inside to outside, from what

he calls “the internal to the external” mode of consciousness, to embrace the

life of the streets. Significantly, the window as screen “diminishes [the street’s]

sounds so that its movements become phantom-like28” recognising how the

urban soundscape works to make sense of the experience of movement and

the street, without which, the image becomes abstracted and “phantom-like”.

When he enters the street, and so “enters art’s message” his experience is of

a multi-sensory “pulsation” – a feeling inside the body that contrasts with the

exteriority of his starting point – the street observed through the windowpane.

Here Kandinsky indicates the perceptual base for experiencing city streets as

an observer, an artistic practice with a heightened form of perception and a

consciousness oscillating or pulsating between inner and outer, between

distanced and immersed, focused and blurred, between the rawness of lived

experience and the sensation of seeing the scene take shape on a screen.

Remembering Kandinsky’s insight that, when observing the street, the screen

of the window “diminishes its sounds so that its movements become phantom-

like”29. I want to finish with the missing dimension – the urban soundscape.

My new digital camera takes video clips, with sound. Suddenly I had

27 Ibid 28 Ibid 29 Ibid

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movement and it was only on playback that I realised I had recorded the

sound of the streets. Walking in the populated city is dominated not just by

peripheral vision but by background murmured sound. We pick up snatches of

conversation, the sound of feet, music in the distance. Neither focus of eye

nor of ear. Much of the time we are lost in our thoughts, not “being a camera”

– an aspect of walking that applies to the city as it does to mountains. We see

the contingent realities as well as the designed. The sense of being part of a

collective, part of a crowd, is held loosely. We are in the street and, as Tim

Ingold reminds us, being there is unlike a photograph or a book – “the world

we inhabit does not confront us, it surrounds us”30. I believe that Kandinsky

would agree.

30 Tim Ingold: Culture, Perception and Cognition, in The Perception of the Environment – Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill (Oxon 2000) p168.