Photo City at the V&A Dundee – Different perspectives on Urbanism

By Thomas Gibbs

As an art historian with a passion for urban design (probably shaped from playing too much SimCity as a child) I was excited as soon as I saw the poster for the V&A Dundee’s latest exhibition. Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World claimed to explore ‘how photography frames the way we experience our cities.’ In reality, the sprawling exhibition often lacked focus, but this was as much a result of its admirable scale as curatorial error. Dealing with multiple media (although the emphasis was indeed on photography) from the end of the 19th century through to the present day, and spanning the globe, Photo City presents the visitor with three rooms full of artistic responses to the built environment. Some were already familiar, László Moholy-Nagy appears in one section, and iconic photographs of New York’s first era skyscrapers are as amazing today as they were when they were taken. Others are from less well-known contemporary artists, including two new commissions.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, with no real regard to chronology, which allows the curators to craft engaging sub narratives for each section. The exhibition text is exceptionally well-written, offering concise but insightful summaries of each work’s context while critiquing problematic histories of some objects. I particularly appreciated that the panels offered multiple points of entry and levels of understanding, which is important for a free exhibition in an institution like the V&A.

Lauren Dauphin for NASA Earth Observatory, Satellite Images of Jakarta using Landsat data from the US Geological Survey, 1990 and 2019, interactive satellite imagery.

The first section on aerial photography was my favourite. It demonstrates how the hot air balloon and then aeroplane allowed ever clearer picturing of cities as a whole. This culminated in satellite photography which ironically abstracts the city entirely until it is unrecognisable. Thanks to Lauren Dauphin’s excellent compositing work, visitors can use an iPad to directly compare NASA photographs of Jakarta to show how massively climate change and urbanisation has changed the landscape over the past thirty years. Jenny Odell’s Every Outdoor Basketball Court in Manhattan and the Centre for Land Use Interpretation’s Houston Petrochemical Corridor Landscan both play with the idea of moving through a landscape from the air to present a social commentary on the impact of the Anthropocene. Looking at these works, I was struck that even fifteen years ago such drone shots would have been unimaginable. The exhibition then deftly introduces Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, an incredible panorama of LA’s Sunset Strip taken from the back of his pickup. This work explores an unusual kind of ductus, taking the viewer on a thoroughly linear journey along the road horizontally, focusing on the shop fronts that would lie perpendicular to the direction of travel and therefore usually pass the viewer by. I was disappointed, however, that Ruscha’s work wasn’t connected to Venturi and Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas which appears later in the exhibition and touches on similar themes. This is just one example of the slightly disjointed feeling in the gallery.

B. Facchinelli, A house in Derb el Ahmar, late 19th century, silver gelatine print; wall card from the V&A Dundee.

Later sections become less focused as they turn to social commentary and the interaction between people and environment. Interestingly, this is explored by both artists and the curators. A particularly intelligent wall-card calls attention to colonial photographic practices in 19th century Cairo and the tendency of long exposures to remove figures from the cityscape, producing ‘cities without people.’ As someone relying on colonial architectural photographs for my dissertation, I thought this was an excellent intervention in an archive that too often goes unquestioned. Later, a work by Penelope Umbrico demonstrates that the iconic photograph of sunshine streaming through the windows of Grand Central Station in New York is in fact a composite that depicts an impossible scene. Here too, the artificiality of photography is contrasted against its promise of accurate representation. However, once again the exhibition fails to make the connection and locates Umbrico’s work in the digital section, just because she engages with a digital technology.

Liam Young (designer and director), Jacob Jonas (choreographer), Shuruq Tramontini (technical lead), Forest Swords (original score), Choreographic Camouflage, 2021, single-channel video.

Throughout the exhibition, archival photographs are mixed with contemporary works which address separate but related themes. Several are concerned with the issue of surveillance, including Kyle McDonald’s Exhausting a Crowd which crowdsourced commentary on CCTV footage of Piccadilly Circus to create an amusing and occasionally profound collage of thoughts. The format immediately reminded me of the 2014 videogame Watch Dogs where popups display the personal information of every passing stranger, except here the popups include the most intimate of thoughts. The aesthetic also reminded me of Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes, a narrative feature film composed entirely of surveillance camera footage and facial recognition data. Photo City revisits surveillance in Liam Young’s film Choreographic Camouflage which explores dance as a form of resistance that renders the body unrecognisable to posture recognition software of the kind used in Hong Kong.

Keiichi Matsuda, Hyper-Reality, 2016, single-channel video.

The theme of surveillance returns in Keiichi Matsuda’s disturbing first-person film, Hyper-reality, which presents a day in the life of a mixed-reality user suffering the worst excesses of capitalism. At a time, particularly after the pandemic, when museums and public institutions are wholeheartedly grasping the possibilities of digital technologies, Matsuda presents a compelling argument against the hybrid digital-physical city. In one scene the user is shopping in a supermarket with a virtual pet in the trolley. The pet calls out for the user to buy products that are on offer in exchange for points, looking disappointed whenever she walks past an expensive product. This disquieting gamification of the grocery-shopping process now pops into my head whenever I see the luminous yellow “Clubcard discount” prices in Tesco – such loyalty programmes are currently at the forefront of our trading privacy for price discounts. Occasionally the system glitches and the depressingly grey reality shines through under the dayglo popups. Although a welcome release from the oppressive visual noise of modern technology, the effect is like coming down from a cocaine high – real life just doesn’t seem bright enough anymore.

Unfortunately, these ideas were not as connected in the exhibition as they sound in this review. The commitment to a non-chronological approach meant that works that logically fit together were separated by the layout and the result was a fragmented and confusing exhibition. There were a lot of competing ideas, which made for a thought-provoking but imperfect exhibition. The themes were far greater than I can explore in even a 1000-word review but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. As a free exhibition in central Dundee, Photo City invites revisiting and repeated engagement. Nonetheless a better exhibition layout and, dare I say it, a clearer (or more strictly followed) curatorial theme for the exhibition could have elevated all the works involved. Photo City is still the best exhibition I have seen at the V&A Dundee yet and the depth of both the captions and artworks stands in stark contrast to the museum’s disappointing permanent collection. I just wish it could have decided which of its stories it wanted to tell.

Bibliography

V&A Dundee, “Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World,” 2024, https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/whatson/exhibitions/photo-city