A snapshot of V&A Dundee’s exhibition Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World

By Jen McLaren, 16.05.2024

Sohei Nishino, ‘Diorama Map, Dundee’ (2024), Inkjet print of original contact print collage

Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World brings together iconic images from the V&A’s collections as well as works by contemporary photographers, architects and digital artists to explore how photography and cities have influenced each other. Jen McLaren selects five highlights from the exhibition...

Dundee is the latest city to be captured in Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino's Diorama Maps series, which already includes New York, Paris, London, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro.

Commissioned by V&A Dundee as part of its Photo City exhibition, at first glance Nishino's panoramic, photographic collages of cities appear to be traditional aerial views. A closer look reveals details of the streets, buildings, people and events he encountered during his time in each location.

To create ‘Diorama Map, Dundee’ (2024) Nishino spent a month in the city, walking the streets, meeting residents and taking thousands of black and white photos in the process. On his return to Japan, he created a collage of his experience, which resulted in a five-metre-wide, semi-realistic, semi-imagined map of Dundee. It is a dynamic and animated view of the city, the presence of human (and animal) life amongst the structures bringing a new dimension to the cityscape.

Corinne Vionnet’s ‘Agra’, from the series ‘Photo Opportunities’ (2006) shows a blurred and ghostly Taj Mahal in Agra, India. This image was achieved by blending thousands of tourists’ photographs from image-sharing websites to create a layered representation, with the famous landmark hovering behind ephemeral crowds. When holiday-makers visit cities around the world they often take similar shots of the same well-known sites, so the resulting work by Vionnet could be considered as an accumulation of all of these photographs of the Taj Mahal.

Vionnet is a Franco-Swiss visual artist based in Switzerland who pioneers the exploration and re-purposing of web-based imagery. Her work includes extensive archival research, photographic image making, the appropriation of crowd-sourced material, and collage.

She also explores the lure of the Internet, which seemingly promises freedom and the discovery of new worlds, yet, in reality, imprisons users within an algorithm space, making them believe they are unique.

Aerial photographs of cities began captivating the public imagination upon their invention in the middle of the 19th century, and the booming metropolises of Europe and North America were the perfect subject matter.

The dizzying heights of the new skyscrapers emerging from the New York skyline attracted the attention of photographers, one being Fred Zinnemann, who went on to become an Oscar-winning film director.

In 1932, Zinnemann – who dreamed of one day publishing a photography book – captured the Rockefeller Center under construction. It shows two workers balancing on steel beams, storeys above the surrounding buildings. The 70-floor Art Deco building was completed in 1933.

Before a successful career directing films such as ‘A Man for All Seasons’, ‘High Noon’, ‘Oklahoma!’ and ‘The Day of the Jackal’, Zinnemann worked as a photographer in Europe and the United States. His images of New York hold a cinematic quality and capture the exhilarating pace of the city.

Denise Scott Brown’s images of Las Vegas taken in the late Sixties were part of Learning from Las Vegas, a landmark study of the architecture of the Las Vegas Strip, published in 1972. 

This photo showing an array of neon signs demonstrates the simultaneous wonder and overwhelm of the world-famous city in Nevada, USA, which is filled with bright lights and entertainment of all varieties.

By arguing in favour of the power of symbolism and image in architectural forms – while also championing a city derided by architects – the study helped usher in the new architectural style of postmodernism. This was a reaction against the monotony of modernism, characterised by its clean lines and the elimination of any unnecessary decorative additions.

Architect, planner, urbanist, theorist, writer and educator Denise Scott Brown was one of its authors, using photography to survey American cities and the patchwork of signs and images that filled the landscape.

‘Choreographic Camouflage ‘(2021) is a 13-minute video work in which dancers bend and contort their bodies, seemingly testing out the limits of their centres of balance. Beautiful movements appear to disrupt software from attempting to scan their bodies, resulting in colourful and blurred formations.

The work is a response to the use of body detection software systems against protestors in Hong Kong, where the Chinese authorities use the software to track, identify and even arrest individuals by mapping their walk or posture.

In this performance, new dance movements have been developed to distort the proportions, symmetry and form of the body, rendering it invisible to body detection software increasingly used in cities globally. 

They subvert using the bodies the software was designed to track, pitting creativity against technology. This work looks at ways in which humans continue to find strategies to liberate the body despite attempts to trap it.

Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World is exhibited at V&A Dundee until 27th October 2024

https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/whatson/exhibitions/photo-city