ABSTRACT
This chapter presents images of three modes of 'excess of fact' in urban life: echoes, encounters, and exchange. They are overlapping forms of successful human assembly, albeit on a small scale, that enact a radical urban aesthetics by producing unfinished zones of contact. As the theorist Henri Lefebvre suggests city plans exist as representations of space while at the same time urban space itself is constituted by the spatial practices of everyday life. The excess of fact that comprises the dialogic occasion of bartering makes this creation of meaning and value possible. What makes the dialogic occasion itself possible is not the imposition of law, but the presence of desire, the desire to create a shared space for the purposes of a achieving a successful transaction. The visual cacophony produced by street photography evokes a radical urban aesthetics by pointing to the gap between the work and an audience's reading of it.
