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.