This blog looks at photographs of urban places and asks ‘What do we we see?’

All photographs are a mixture of visual fact and photographer’s art, but I want to look closely at the physical subject matter of the pictures: the buildings and spaces, the signs of urban life – what the photographer shows us, what we actually see and what it says about a place.

Photography intensifies reality, gives all details a significance. We are familiar with the idea of reading guidebooks and maps; this is about reading photographs to gain insights about urban places.

In the 1930s, the architect Harry Goodhart-Rendel observed that: ‘The modern architectural drawing is interesting, the photograph is magnificent, the building is an unfortunate but necessary stage between the two’ – quoted by Jonathan Meades in his book Museum without Walls.

Yvonne Estop