Visual Cultures Year 2 Journal 1

Picturing the city

Photographing the urban experience

The urban landscape is something that is constantly changing, as the population expands so do the cities. With this brings about a lot of change, to the appearance of the landscape and also to the way the newer buildings look in comparison to the older ones. 

Throughout the years these changes are documented and admired by many, in the modern day this tends to be through photographs but hundreds of years ago artist had the same ideas and would paint the cities, giving documented examples of how they change.

In the in between stages when photography was relatively new some artist would uses photographs as references opposed to painting from primary sources (their view of the city).

What is moderninity

Source: Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930 by Richard Dennis.

Bringing cities into the modern times in the case of New York city and London started with building bridges, two of the most well know bridges in history, Brooklyn bridge and Tower bridge. 
Richard James said in his book "to build bridges connecting cultural and economic interpretations of urbanization". Building bridges connects city to city town to town, it gives a city transport between the two, it brings the opportunity to trade more bringing about economic change helping the city thrive and along with that changing the urban landscape.
Source: https://michellela87.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/women-walking-crowds-and-capitalism-modernity-depicted-through-art-in-nineteenth-century-paris/

1852 Paris had a population boom, the rising population reached 1.5 million. This lead to an extensive rebuilding process in order to cope with the demands of the ever growing population. This turned this medieval ruin of a city into a modernized capital. 
The artist Gustave Caillebotte painted an image of Paris in 1877 of the new city, entitled 'Paris street, rainy day' (shown to the right).
within the painting you can see the modern appearance of the city and also the higher class of the inner city residence. Caillebotte also had a very keen interest in photography, the images at the front of the painting are sharp and in focus and as you move back in the painting it gets more and more out of focus, this style of painting became more and more common as photography came about.

Atkinson Grimshaw's is another example of a painter who would paint the changing landscape from a photograph. His painting shown to the right entitled painter of moonlight shows the city of London after the tower bridge was built as stated earlier cities that build bridges connecting place to place allows economic growth through trade, therefore not only would the bridge be a new structure added to the ever growing city but it would bring more trade, supplying the city with more money to expand further.

The image to the left is by an anonymous painter, it depicts Charing cross station in the 19th century.
From the painting it is obvious that the people depicted hold some wealth, almost certainly in the upper class. They have beautiful ball gown type dresses and dapper suits.
The architecture itself is grand also showing that the will have been a lot invested to make this station look that way, the artist captured the sheer scale of the building and how the roof lets light in through glass/ windows.