I have owned Gabriele Basilico’s 1998 book Interrupted City for years, and while fascinated by his matter-of-fact picture making, could make no sense of it, not knowing Milan. Having now spent a few days in the city, the book springs to life. With a basic appreciation of the form of the city and its scale the pictures have a context. How important it is to give a book like this some context for an international audience. It is missing from this book, which means that reading it is about deciphering it.

Basilico’s book is important as a concentrated and concerted study of one city – other photographers flit between cities and take single pictures. This is a book about the appearance of Milan – the bland post-war office buildings a block away from the Duomo, factories along the urban margins, the business parks. It is anchored by the city’s arteries – the two rail stations and the long canal entering the city from the south.

To avoid describing ‘a city as big as Milan in all its complexity’ running the risk of ‘an exhausting and incomplete work whose narrative tension is watered down into an ambitious but unmanageable mosaic of fragments,’ Basillico constructs ‘a partial narration’, based on three separate parts of the city:

1. A centrally located, high density business area between the two stations, that was extensively rebuilt in the years after the war ending in 1945. It shows its ‘aspiration towards a city model that is rationalist, modernist and international, plus emphatically high-rise.’
2. Observations from the nineteenth century city bordering the historic centre, containing monuments and historically important buidlings. These are ‘a few fragments, urban extractions’ Here Basilico brought together different locations – some with a ‘shared sense of coherence of certain spaces, squares in the main; some a coexisting diversity. This is the ‘hard core’ which he implies is the the strong successful basis of the city.
3. The outskirts of the city, where cities break their own boundaries, where abandoned buildings grow new, unforeseen life. Vast areas of disused land and factory buildings awaiting transformation, with ‘legions of buildings clustering in ordered groups along the redefined borders and others along the access roads into the city.

That provides the introduction. But from there on, the book does not orientate the viewer, there are no captions. Here is Gabriele Basilico, one of the great urban landscape photographers, photographing his home town of Milan. But what is he showing us? A map in a book of urban photographs? Somehow that seems to have been far too simplistic for the author and publisher. It is totally needed and would not diminish the photographs.

The book was commissioned by the Councillor for the Quality of Urban Life at Milan City Council, and published by an urban studies publisher, yet it remains an art book with the precious art publishing practice of leaving it all up to the mystified reader.

Nevertheless it is a highly revealing study of different spatial characteristics of the city’s locations and land uses. It is a monumental essay of the time – mid 1990s and a combnation of stable prosperous city, and areas waiting for regeneration and change.

The photographer says the book represents the general urban condition – this is wrong – it is wholly about Milan’s dynamic condition. The relationship between the photographer and his own city is what makes it powerful. Its commerce, its relics, its newness, its car parks and overbearing streets of modernist and post-modernist architecture. With no people. This is not the Milan of creativity, it is the Milan as economic powerhouse in its stark physicality – offices, hotels. A factual topography of urban fabric.

Basilico’s photos are luscious, highly considered compositions of form and light. The prints have lustrous tones within the monochrome. In all pictures, he adjusts the camera lens to ‘correct’ the persepective so that buildings are seen vertical, not receding, which give the pictures a solidity and stability.

Basilico is sentimental – he introduces the book with a ‘Letter to a city’ he says ‘I love this city the way you love an old and dear friend.’ He has ‘soft spot for the attractive bits and the more sordid bits of its body, for its neighbourhoods and houses, its walls and pavements’. He is driven to photograph ‘A constant need to know its corporeality obsesses me, a need to interpret its features and its hidden parts… over and over again.’ He is mystical, as if the city spirit speaks ‘At times I get the feeling it’s suddenly revealing itself more fully to me, that its telling me of its obstructions, its consistency and its material.’

 

Since Basilico died in 2013, there have been dramatic changes on vast areas of former industrial land around the city, as they change use to residential, parkland and business quarters, opening new connections.

Photographs of an outwardly ordinary housing estate, which show how visionary ideas about green space and car free areas created a good place for growing up.

Ian Waites’s book Middlefield: A Post-war Council Estate in Time is a highly focused photographic essay about a modern housing estate. This is a council estate – built as public housing. It is modernist – the form and appearance following principles of light, outlook and ventilation. It is theory into practice – the radical idea of placing the fronts of houses to face shared open space with roads and parking at the rear. 

Ian Waites returned to the estate in Gainsborough where he grew up to look again: to remember his personal associations, his family living in a new house, and growing up with his friends nearby. The photographs reveal his memories of childhood friends, prompted by the appearance of houses and children’s play areas. But Waites also returned to objectively critique: bringing an understanding of how and why the estate was built, its spatial arrangement, its robustness after decades of occupation and how things have changed. Now it has mature trees; garages and play spaces have been altered or removed, shops have gone.

Even with such changes, Waites shows an optimistically modern planning and architecture that works successfully for the people that live there – now presumably with many right-to-buy private owned houses. ‘The new estate pushed the town further into the countryside. The homes lined up against open fields….’ This estate extended the town outwards, a simple observation reflecting major planning decisions, typical in towns across the country. Waites says ‘critics of the time looked down upon this type of open development…… this was “Prairie Planning”.

But Waites’s book is sympathetic and positive. The appendix carefully lays out the facts about Middlefield’s visionary local authority origins, the architecture, planning and other cultural influences. In the introduction, Ian Waites speaks about the mature, established place years after Middlefield’s ‘new’ housing design was built by George Wimpey and Co Ltd: ‘The reality of the estate as it is today begins to assert itself, and on its own terms. New families live there now, while children continue to play in the same special places as I did. In a time of housing scarcity, this book reminds us that Middlefield is still here, is still essential, and still growing into something as we remember it.’ Of course, this is the case for hundreds of such housing estates of this era.

A photo that shows more than simply a car parked outside a house. We learn from the book that cars were kept ’round the back’ along short, cut de sac service lanes. This is the back of the house. The council originally built garages – in 2012 a number of these were removed, leaving clean white rectangles. The car is standing on the concrete that replaced garages. The photos suggest that the fencing replaced original horizontal board fencing.

The fronts of houses were reached by footpaths and led straight onto large, safe green spaces.

Waites observes, ‘Parks – Middlefied was… progressive: in 1965 it already had two play parks, one each side of the shopping precinct.’...

‘The baby park where the teenagers hang out…. ‘the big park’, where ten and eleven year-olds play….they have named all these parks, labelling them for themselves, creating reference points for their future memories.’

The photographs are categorised under headings focussed on typical characteristics of the estate, such as ‘Kerbs’, ‘Pebbledash’, ‘Maisonettes’, ‘Greens’, ‘Signs’, ‘Cut-throughs – the paths between houses that ‘threaded the estate together, and joined up the lives of the children who lived there’. Here is an example, a typological photograph of a streetlight:

‘The Phosco P107’ – ‘The P107 was the local authority lamppost of choice during the 1960s, and they are still being made today in Hertfordshire, that postwar stronghold of the council estate and new town’.

This small book contains a photo essay and observations about a specific council housing estate in Lincolnshire. Specific to the place and specific to the author’s life. The essay shows us how housing becomes home, and does so repeatedly over generations. Ian Waites does not say this, but the significance of the book is partly that it speaks for many housing estates and many personal memories of home. It manages to do this with carefully made photographs and a succinct commentary.

Ian Waites is a senior lecturer in the history of art and design at the University of Lincoln. His research explores the landscapes, histories, dreams and memories of post war England. The book is published by Uniform books 2017.

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.