ABSTRACT
To experience a city is to contemplate scale. Photography, which ‘fiddle[s] with the scale of the world’ (Sontag 1979: 4), is a natural companion to such contemplations and city photography is especially self-conscious in its fiddling. It pits the individual against a backdrop of the sprawl, the massive, and the mass; it responds to the city’s invitations to innovation in perspective and method; it records the ways in which urban environments threaten violence to intimate experiences of human scale. City photography speaks to the general problem of negotiating space, and to the specific problem of negotiating a space for dwelling. It is with good reason that Dominique Baqué appends to the title of her recent essay on photography of the postmodern city a question mark: ‘Pour un lieu où vivre?’ (‘Towards a Dwelling Place?’) (Baqué 2004). Baqué thus suggests that recent urban photography interrogates city space in such a way as to problematize both the conditions and the very possibility of dwelling.
