Grasping how difficult it is to define urban design, Francis Tibbalds collected a multitude of ways of expressing the physical, spatial nature of the built environment, the multi-disciplinary and political process of urban change and management. These definitions Included ‘Urban design is everything that you can see out of the window’. A lovely simple idea that puts space between buildings first, architecture second. While it allows urban design to be ‘everything’, it also says that any view is only a small part of the whole urban place.

This prompts an approach to photographing places, whereby the window is a picture frame, like every photograph. It is a ‘given’ outlook, with a meaningful context provided by knowing what interior we are looking out of. The window always gives a partial view, parts of other buildings, parts of roads, a sense of more beyond. This is exactly like photographs, but photographs often take on a false authority that says ‘this is a statement of fixed reality, representing the whole’.

The window is human scale, giving a human view and, we know, just one of hundreds of windows in that place. Windows always face space, they are a defining characteristic of space, the eyes on the street. In a way, Tibbalds gave photography a fantastic role for expressing the idea of places for people – another way of defining urban design.

Most of my photographs here are from the inside of public buildings. There are also four photographs from well-known photographers.

Tony Wilson Place, Manchester, from Home arts centre

Royal Crescent and St Augustine’s Road, Ramsgate from The Churchill Tavern

Museum Street and British Museum, Bloomsbury from a Routemaster bus on New Oxford Street

Sheaf Square and Hallam University, Sheffield from the railway station.

Belsham Street, Hackney, London E9, from my car.

Pancras Square, Kings Cross Quarter from Leon cafe

Leadenhall Market, City of London, from the Lamb Tavern

Gillett Square, Dalston, from the Vortex Jazz Club

Battle Bridge Place, From London St Pancras station

Hoe Street and High Street, Walthamstow from Central Parade, Bread Today and Meanwhile Space workspaces

Boris Savelev, from Secret City, Photographs from the USSR, 1988

Window of my studio, Josef Sudek, 1950 Studio

Richard Einzig, Pompidou Centre, 1978

Bill Owens, Suburbia. In this photograph, the view out of the window into the garden shows an extraordinary industrial landscape of gantries beyond, perhaps a railway and power pylons.

The exhibition Strange and Familiar (Barbican London 2016 / Manchester City Art Gallery 2017) shows Britain as seen by foreign photographers. It includes French photographer Raymond Depardon, who photographed in Glasgow in 1980. The show conspicuously omits Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, the Finnish photographer who photographed in Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1970s. Tate Modern makes up for this with a room devoted to her work in the Living Cities permanent display.

Both photographers focused on a specific city neighbourhood. Konttinen in Byker, east Newcastle; Depardon in Govan, south west Glasgow and the Gorbals in south east Glasgow.

The photos below show the massive side wall of Govan Shipbuilders in Taransay Street (though Depardon does not identify it), and the cobbled road surface at the ends of terraces in Janet Street, Byker.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980     Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Girl on a Spacehopper, Janet Street backlane

Both areas have a lot in common – inner city industrial districts two miles out of the city centre, both on the river bank, formed of high density, terraced worker housing, serving riverside industry and shipyards. The photographs feature the muscular housing and street form distinctive to each – in Byker: Tyneside flats in two-storey terraces, in Govan: four storey tenement blocks. In these two photographs we see the backs of housing terraces.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980      Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Beresford Road / Avondale Road backlane

Both areas were in the process of dramatic change, with the decline of river-oriented industry, the condemnation and redevelopment of housing in modernist estates. This change is evident in both sets of photos.

Both photographers use a similar reportage approach to photography; both show streets populated by children and older people, run-down businesses, unmaintained streets.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980      Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen St Peters Road

But there is a considerable difference in sympathy. Konttinen lived in Byker for a few years and knew the people as neighbours. The photographs are located by street names. Depardon came from France for the Sunday Times and looked for the grimmest part of the city which he photographed like a war reporter, The view is detached, there is no sense of community, all the photographs are titled ‘Glasgow’ not ‘Govan’. They seem to show people alienated by their environment, whereas Konttinen shows families and individuals, integral to the place, with humour and empathy. She gained the trust of people and photographed inside homes, hairdressers, clubs, while revealing the hardship, stress and outdated facilities.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980.      Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Mending the pavement

Both essays show how good photography is in recording fragments of ‘the present’ in its revealing detail. The photographs are of living places, with signs of age, poor condition and poverty. But both, even in the affection of Konttinen’s Byker, also show how inadequate photography is in narrating urban change. In their static reality, there are hoardings and demolition, signs of the economic shifts taking place, but no sense of the complex machinations of urban change that affected both areas, the politics, the decanting and re-housing, the urban roads taking the economic focus away from the river and changing the social geography of the city.

Left: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Ragman’s horse and cart     Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen St Peters Road

In retrospect, we know this. But to visit the places now, we not only see the developments that transformed these neighbourhoods, but also the subsequent stages of regeneration; the urban and community responses to and adaptation of the modernist housing solutions that followed these photographs. And incidentally, that shipyard wall and tenement block on Taransay Street in Govan is still there, conserved and beautifully enhanced.

Friday 28 April 2017 – A stimulating one-day symposium at Goldsmith’s College, New Cross, London called Engaging in urban image making organised by Gill Golding and Anita Strasser. Exploring how image making can support our understanding of some of the complexities associated with contemporary urban life.

Those complexities we heard about ranged across local area political dissent, the vulnerability of a delicate community formed around ten pin bowling, post-terrorist trauma in New York, the loss of London places to property investors, faith communities sharing interests through food, the exaggerated friction of eastern European immigrants and the threat of airport expansion. Even the effect of annual pasture migration of sheep on a northern Italian city.

Most are explored by photographers, filmmakers, researchers through a deep trusting engagement with the communities affected by these complexities. It is an urban photography that looks at causes and effects of social change, reflected in some degree in physical structures and spatial reorganization. This symposium brought several academic and practitioner bodies together.

I wondered, what can visual media do? Photography and film as a means of data collection and research, as a means for engaging with citizens, as a revealer of emotional truth, a counter to prejudice, as a campaigning method, as an instrument of change.

How does urban image making relate to the processes of change and urban place making? How could urban place making make better use of photographic media? How do ordinary people engage with their familiar places, their neighbours and the political process through visual material? The visual is powerful and direct, dominated by advertising and press, so it takes a lot of skill and sensitivity to use that power for community engagement.

Photographs make an impact when presented at large scale on the street. The pictures have a special resonance when they are about the local place they are situated in. Photographs displayed within the street may be screening something unsightly, but they provide an engaging insight into the place. Their impact is greater when seen outdoors, close to the ‘real’ place. The flâneur is someone who strolls and casually enjoys observing life on the street – photographs placed on the street make flâneurs of us all.

The picture above is a set of photographs covering a building undergoing changes in Antwerp. It shows several old photos of imposing city architecture, but also a domestic street scene. These displays are provided by the city authorities – it is partly a screen, partly an urban interpretation, partly marketing. It manages to make old photographs relevant to the modern, changing city.

These are recycling bins in the London Borough of Redbridge. The black and white photos make the bins more presentable but also reveal fascinating local scenes. The picture on the left is Hermon Hill in Wanstead, with villas and handsome trees. It is a very ordinary street scene. Presented at this scale, it is possible to see the detail – four or five pedestrians, a horse and cart parked at the kerb, a woman cycling away. The picture on the right is a robust footbridge over the River Roding, in good condition, with a water works in the background. It is as fresh as yesterday, but gone without trace. This is the Red bridge that gives the borough its name.

These photographs are taken in Moulsham Street, Chelmsford, Essex, directly adjacent to the building they now enliven. These are blank side street windows of Quadrant department store. It is the scale of the pictures that make these so compelling – nearly life size. It is possible to read the signs in the shops, to see the expressions on people’s faces, study their clothing – the effect is like stepping into the scene.

Tošo Dabac was a prolific photographer  in Zagreb, working between the 1930s and 1960s. This is his studio, currently housing an archive of his work, with the windows covered with his photographs. The pictures include photographs of the city, taken from unusual viewpoints, now placed in the context of a busy street. The mode of presentation is fascinating, catching the eye and then confusing image with the physicality of the shop, with its curved glass, and street clutter.

This article is about the changing view as you walk along a street, represented in photographs. A sequence of photographs taken in a small area is closer to our perceptions of walking through a place than a static single image. What is excluded from one image is revealed in another. As you move closer to a building, the perspective changes, the juxtaposition with other buildings is seen.

In his 1998 book Interrupted City, Gabriele Basilico presents a photographic exploration of modern Milan. The book contains several groups of three, four or five photos, each group taken within a small area, looking in different directions at the same buildings and space. Together, on close reading, they describe a small part of the city in a three dimensional, dynamic manner.

It is not easy to see how the pictures connect, and Basilico leaves it up to the viewer to see, but in each group there is a building that appears in each image, distant or close up. If you want to take the time, the photos are highly revealing of that particular place.

The Concise Townscape is one of the seminal texts of urban design, in which Gordon Cullen analyses how we experience cities as we walk through them. The term has become a commonplace, but the book demonstrates a vast number of perceptual phenomena, which he names and illustrates with drawings and photographs.

One of the key concepts is ‘serial vision’ – the sequence of openings, building groups, vistas, turns, closures that we see walking through streets and spaces.

The book is rich with examples of these visual incidents, shown mainly in plans and in sketches. In one part of the book Cullen describes the concept of ‘closure’, where a linear street is perceived as contained scenes, while retaining the sense of progression. Using Blandford Forum in Dorset as an example, he uses photographs to show each stage of progression along a street. He uses a crude handwritten ‘A’ to identify a building appearing in successive pictures.

But this has always fascinated me because Cullen makes a mistake – close scrutiny shows he has taken a step back rather than forward and marked the wrong building.

However, I have used Cullen’s marker device to navigate one set of Basilico’s Milan pictures, In the pictures that follow, I have marked the same building which is seen from different directions.

In this sequence, shown in the order they appear in the book, Basilico photographs a nondescript part of the post-war redeveloped city. But this is a mixed-use, mixed-age area with a residential high-rise and a hotel next to offices. The focus of the photos is an old warehouse or factory building that has remained amongst the new developments and now sits awkwardly cheek by jowl with the office building at the centre of the three streets Basilico navigates.

there is one other feature that is relevant to reading these pictures and understanding them in the context of Milan. The fourth picture shows a building in the background that is the subject of a previous group of pictures. This is one of a pair of tower blocks next to Garibaldi Railway Station. With that knowledge, the location of the area in these pictures, just south of the station makes more sense.

A famous photograph of the derelict railway on the High Line in New York City and two texts. The first quotation is from a book about photography; the second from a book about the campaign to transform the High Line into an urban parkland.

Joel Sternfield – Looking East on Thirtieth Street on a Monday Morning in May 2000. Chromogenic (Type C) colour print

‘Like many contemporary photographers, Joel Sternfield uses essentially the same equipment as the 19^th-century pioneers – a large view camera, complete with black focusing cloth and tripod…. He has his negatives scanned and printed digitally.

‘This image comes from one of his best recent projects, for which he followed the High Line, a derelict elevated railroad track that runs for over a mile in Manhattan. The line is overgrown – improbably returned to nature within one of the most densely developed cities in the world. Sternfield photographed for over a year, in all seasons, doing nothing fancy, but giving us an unexpected and decidedly intriguing view of New York City.’

Gerry Badger, The Genius of Photography, 2007. Quadrille Publishing Ltd

The High Line is a celebrated urban regeneration project, which has had a major economic and environmental impact in New York and stimulated projects in other countries. Joshua David and Robert Hammond, West Side residents who had no prior experience in planning and development, led a campaign to protect the derelict railway structure and convert it to a linear park, leading to spectacular fundraising, political support and a major public space project, transforming the surrounding neighbourhoods. Joel Sternfield’s photograph was made for this campaign.

‘We wanted to photograph it. We had been up there and seen this incredible wildscape – seen the city in a whole new way – but people couldn’t see it from the street, and our own snapshots didn’t capture it.

‘I mentioned our need for photos to Ray Gastil, at the Van Alen Institute…. Ray said, “Why don’t you call Joel Sternfield for your photos?” He said Joel had taken pictures of aqueducts outside of Rome and some other industrial-landscape photographs.

‘I found his number in the phone book and called him – was he interested? As soon as Joel saw it, he took me aside and said, “I want to do this. Don’t let anyone else up here for a year.”

‘We got permission for Joel to go up there by himself, anytime he wanted to, to photograph the High Line for a year. We had no idea at the time that these photos would come to define the project and would propel it forward the way they did.

‘Later, I found out that Joel was a famous photographer.’

‘…. we gave the photos to The New Yorker. People remember Adam Gopnik’s article as being about the High Line, but it was really about Joel and his process. It mentions Josh and and me and our efforts – it calls us a group of “West Side do-gooders.”

‘I think of Joel as a third co-founder. The photos he took became important tools for us. Instead of showing people architectural renderings, we would show Joel’s photos.

People could read different things into them. In one of his most famous photos of the High Line, looking East along Thirtieth Street on the rail yards section, you can see the Empire State Building, an old metal railroad box, the tracks, the various plants, and lots of different buildings, old and new. Some people would look at the photo and see a preservation project. Some would see horticulture. Rail buffs would get excited about the tracks. Some people imagined architecture.’

Joshua David and Robert Hammond, High Line, The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky. 2011 Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The influential American photographer Garry Winogrand came to London a couple of times in the 1960s – there are three photos taken in London in his retrospective monograph Winogrand: Figments of the Real World. 

‘A fast-moving street photographer who delighted in the complexities, banalities and bizarreness of urban life, he used intelligence, wit and his camera in roughly equal measures to make some of the most influential and frequently imitated pictures of the 1960s.’ American Images, 1985

Garry Winogrand, London c.1967 

Winogrand took this picture of a woman in Kings Road, looking south along Walpole Street – though for him it was simply ‘London’. It is an incidental piece of London street scene framing the woman in a hurry. The road and buildings were of no consequence in themselves to him.

The first part of Walpole Street is a brick wall and a blank facade at the side of a shop facing Kings Road. It’s a supermarket – an articulated trailer with a Safeway logo is inside a loading bay. Kings Road is a local high street serving a dense neighbourhood: above the supermarket is a modernist apartment block. Beyond the loading bay and store, the side street becomes smartly residential, with a four storey terrace of houses and flats. It is a respectable solid building, with Victorian proportions, but the nearer part is a recent post-war re-building, designed to fit closely with the older original, but without the equivalent elegant refinement, without chimneys. On Kings Road, the road surface is most prominent – the white stones set within the freshly laid hot rolled asphalt, and a Zebra crossing: Kings Road is a London through-route.

The young woman is at work in the city. Neatly stylish, collar rumpled, she is dressed for the office or studio, carrying a portfolio as well as shoulder/hand bag and a capacious holdall. She is carrying an Afghan coat and wears large round glasses; conventional fashion, rather than Kings Road showiness.

Around the same time Winogrand took this picture, Ian Nairn said, ‘Chelsea is only relatively remarkable… looked at coldly, it is made up of a few pretty bits set in an unlovely mixture of the utilitarian and the genteel. The trouble is that there are no eccentric buildings to match the eccentric people. Kings Road sums up the social aorta of Chelsea perfectly: full of idiosyncratic life, yet without anything in the buildings to express it. What makes this all the more sad is that the Chelsea recipe is very exciting. It is all mixed up, with rough and smooth side by side…. The late-nineteenth century houses and studios are not much fun; the picturesqueness is applied, not instinct.’ Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London 1966