Non-perspectival photography: Towards a post-digital visuality.

Photographic Powers, edited by Mika Elo and Marko Karo – Helsinki Photomedia 2014, Helsinki, Oct 2015, 2015

Power is most effective when it acts unawares. Women for example may accept male domination or peasants the rule of their overlord believing that this is part of the natural order of things. Something like this happens with photography, whose perspective system is taken for granted and believed to be correct. This essay challenges this photographic view of the world. It presents still and moving images by the present writer which, though photographic, employ other representational systems such as orthographic and other isometric projections which are equally coherent and correct. It asks how our feelings towards the world are affected by the sort of prism we choose to look through and seeks to demonstrate that reality is not an absolute, but a construct which we have made for ourselves and which can therefore be remodelled.

Sophia Journal, 2022

How to explore photography as a way of problematizing urban phenomena? Is it possible to use different aesthetic concepts, in photography, to expand the dialogue with cities? These two questions guide the photographic research developed as part of the project, "Highrise Living and the Inclusive City", with a focus in São Paulo / Brazil and Lyon / France. The first question highlights the territory and the production of capitalist urban space by photography realized in fieldwork. The second one involves editing and re-elaborating the images, considering the approximation between the research project, local records and photography aesthetic. The High-Rise Project, on the other hand, discusses the contemporary verticalization process and its spatial and social implications in Sao Paulo city, considering a contextual (São Paulo, Lyon) and multiscale analysis model, while incorporating different reading strategies and territory interpretation. The field study, initially organized as a team, resulted in different materials, including the photographic one, from which discussion and editing meetings were conducted by this researcher, considering possibilities for language experiments in interaction with the territory. The series and photographic montages realized allowed a reflection about the relationship between public spaces and paths capturing a specific ambience to the places; and, also, exploring different comparative strategies that highlight, in the four distinct regions, intense landscape transformation due to verticalization. On the other hand, these photographic setting acquire a relative autonomy in relation to the original project, being placed on the edge of applicated use of image and esthetic research with its own characteristics.

Sophia, 2022

How to explore photography as a way of problematizing urban phenomena? Is it possible to use different aesthetic concepts, in photography, to expand the dialogue with cities? These two questions guide the photographic research developed as part of the project, "Highrise Living and the Inclusive City", with a focus in São Paulo / Brazil and Lyon / France. The first question highlights the territory and the production of capitalist urban space by photography realized in fieldwork. The second one involves editing and re-elaborating the images, considering the approximation between the research project, local records and photography aesthetic. The High-Rise Project, on the other hand, discusses the contemporary verticalization process and its spatial and social implications in Sao Paulo city, considering a contextual (São Paulo, Lyon) and multiscale analysis model, while incorporating different reading strategies and territory interpretation. The field study, initially organized as a team, resulted in different materials, including the photographic one, from which discussion and editing meetings were conducted by this researcher, considering possibilities for language experiments in interaction with the territory. The series and photographic montages realized allowed a reflection about the relationship between public spaces and paths capturing a specific ambience to the places; and, also, exploring different comparative strategies that highlight, in the four distinct regions, intense landscape transformation due to verticalization. On the other hand, these photographic setting acquire a relative autonomy in relation to the original project, being placed on the edge of applicated use of image and esthetic research with its own characteristics.

Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Routledge, 2017

This article o ers a philosophical account of a range of urban phenomena that are integral to the visual fabric of the modern city and, at the same time, external to the visual order administered by the city’s rulers. Explaining why the common terms of “gra ti” and “street art” are too narrow for discussing the plurality of the illicit visual forms that populate the city’s space, I coin the alternative term “streetography” and aim at a new understanding of its visual e cacy. This is done by showing that the key for deciphering the streetograph’s unique visuality is its form of embeddedness in the street and, in a corollary manner, the form of visual experience—the kinds of viewing—that the street opens for the urban viewer. Streetographs always operate within the city’s given visual order and as such the question of their e cacy is addressed here in terms of the streetograph’s relationship to that hegemonic visual rule whose basic traits are also clari ed. Developing an understanding of this relationship, the article thus addresses the following questions: What kind of resistance can streetographs provide to the kind of optics that governs the modern urban space? Can streetographs evoke an alternative kind of spectatorship that disrupts the sovereign’s imagination? And, more speci cally, in an epoch in which streetographs are regularly absorbed into capitalist aesthetics— advertising, cinema, social media—how can they allow us to rethink the possibility of resisting the measure of a global capitalist visual system?

ARS, 2024

This essay focuses on artworks created through the reproduction and appropriation of images available in the interface of Google Street View. As a reflection of the growing proliferation of images produced by automated cameras, independently of human perception and cognition, these artworks provoke a reconsideration of the photographic act, the role of the artist as a commentator on and curator of images, the sublimation of authorship thus entailed, and the ontology of the photographic image. The fact that such artworks are created by extracting images from the Google Street View interface could be perceived as indicative of certain visual redundancies. This article argues, on the contrary, that the photographic works in question are different from each other insofar as they entail specific creative techniques, modes of aesthetic appropriation, and critical approaches.

Economic Geography, 1966

Visualizing the Street New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City, 2018

From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized. Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies – From Hong Kong’s streets to Rio’s favelas, from Sydney’s suburbs to London’s street markets, and from Damascus’ war-torn streets to Istanbul’s sidewalks – and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.

Sophia Journal: On the Surface: Photography on Architecture | Visual Spaces of Change: unveiling the publicness of urban space, 2019

The 5th International Conference ON THE SURFACE: Photography on Architecture - Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image, which took place on the 31st of May 2019 on occasion of MAAT’s Fiction and Fabrication exhibition offered a forum for an interdisciplinary debate on photography and architecture, with a strong editorial component devoted to the publication of original works and ideas at the intersection of these two fields. Aiming to promote the awareness and reflection upon Architecture and Art, namely documentary photography in regard to its conception as an instrument to question the universes of Architecture, City and Territory, the theme chosen for this edition of On the Surface focused on the contemporary transformations of the public space: “Visual Spaces of Change: unveiling the publicness of urban space”. Proposing to debate and explore the potential of Image and Photography as resourceful tools to research and to reflect upon and render visible the emergence of new collective experiences in the social space, the focus was on Documentary and Artistic Photography for addressing crosscutting issues that are shaping contemporary changes in cosmopolitan territories. is conference wanted in this way to contribute for greater social interaction among artistic and cultural institutions and academia, extending the action of museums, universities and art venues beyond their traditionally circumscribed spaces of action, stimulating the agents and institutions involved to be more active and open to debate in their approaches to public space. The intention was to render visible aspects of urban change, as well as how architectures, places and spaces are used and lived, crossing and shifting traditional boundaries for expanding the capacity of institutions to participate in the public domain. In this sense, we aim to contribute for critically thinking architecture as an integrative field of knowledge with historical, cultural, social, economic and political dimensions, and explore photography as a dynamic process of discovery, documentation and reflection that incorporates interpretive, artistic and even fictional aspects of these multiple dimensions. On the Surface 2019 challenged authors and researchers from the fields of photography and architecture to discuss and use image and photography to better understand the city as a living organism, a rich multifaceted space characterized by a variety of experiences and programs, which are a reflection of the knowledge, beliefs, values and customs that characterize different societies. us, a central objective of the conference was to discuss in what way image and photography can be used to unveil how architecture expresses the cultural values and identity of our cities, being these critical research instruments for understanding and perceiving architecture in meaningful ways, as well as for understanding the past in order to better grasp the transformations that are increasingly influencing our social practices and place experiences, affecting the modes of citizen participation and cultural interaction. By overlapping and crisscrossing the disciplinary boundaries of Image, Art and Architecture, the borders of these disciplinary fields are challenged for critically thinking through contemporary changes occurring in between physical and virtual dimensions of everyday life. Through the realization of these debates, it was intended to contribute to the creation of a space of exploration, discussion and reflection towards new ideas and research paths about the use of photography as an instrument of visual research and communication, as well as about architecture and the public space, with a focus on emerging dynamics of urban transformation. Lastly it is important to refer the significant connection of this conference to the project Visual Spaces of Change that the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) is coordinating, which integrates a significant component of Contemporary Photography in its research, together with the participation of other national and international academic bodies and research institutions that are involved. In fact, by bringing some of the themes of the VSC research project to this 5th edition of ON THE SURFACE: Photography on Architecture, we aim to contribute for opening academia to society, fostering collaboration among a wide range of cultural and artistic institutions towards common interests and goals. Intertwining the research group CCRE-CEAU-FAUP and Cityscopio Cultural Association, scopio Editions will be again the official publisher of this conference. Thus this 4th number of Sophia, Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image is dedicated to this International Conference ON THE SURFACE: Photography and Architecture - Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space, publishing the papers based on the works that were presented at the conference. These papers constitute a significant example of investigation on how contemporary photography can be explored as a meaningful instrument of research about contemporary processes of urban change, producing visual synthesis about how architectures, places and spaces are used and lived, rendering visible aspects which are difficult to perceive without the purposeful use of image and photography. This means, besides other things, to inquire and study the possibilities offered by photography in various dimensions, oscillating between reality, poetry and utopia, creatively introducing new links between realistic representations, fictional worlds and symbolic meanings, articulated in conceptual discourses and visual narratives that are communicated through the specific grammar and syntax of photographic image. The conference was organized by the Center of Communication and Spatial Representation (CCRE), integrated in R&D Center of the Architecture School of the University of Porto (FAUP), in partnership with the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) and scopio Editions. ON THE SURFACE: Photography on Architecture Visual Spaces of Change: unveiling the publicness of urban space SCOPIO EDITIONS SOPHIA COLLECTION Porto, 2020 Publisher Cityscopio – Associação Cultural Rua da Cidreira 291, 4465-076 Porto (Matosinhos), Portugal [email protected] www.cityscopio.com Editorial and Advisory Board Research group CCRE integrated in R&D of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) called Centro de Estudos de Arquitectura e Urbanismo (CEAU) Via Panorâmica S/N, 4150-755 Porto, Portugal [email protected] tel: +351 226057100 | fax: +351 226057199 Scientific and Editorial Commission (CEAU-FAUP) Fátima Pombo (UA / DECA / ID+) Iñaki Bergera (Arquitectura / Unizar) José Miguel Rodrigues (FAUP) Marco Iuliano (LSA/CAVA) Pedro Leão Neto (FAUP) Susana Ventura (FAUP) Wilfried Wang (UTSoA) Editorial Coordinator Pedro Leão Neto Editors Pedro Leão Neto Iñaki Bergera - Invited Editor Editorial Collaborators Eduardo Silva Maria Neto ISBN 978-989-54318-8-5 ISSN 2183-8976 Dep. Legal No 465440/19 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means or stored in any information storage or retrieval system without the editor’s written permission. All photographs featured in Sophia are © of the photographers. Reviewers of Sophia 4th Number Álvaro Domingues (FAUP / CEAU) Ana Francisca de Azevedo (DeGeoUM/Lab2PT) David Viana (CEAU / VSC) Fátima Pombo (UA / DECA / ID+) Francisco Ferreira (EAUM - Lab2PT) Isa Clara Neves (CES) Jorge Marum (UB I/ CCRE) José Barbedo (FAUP / CEAU) Margarida Medeiros (FCSH) Olívia da Silva (IPP – ESMAD) Pedro Leão Neto (FAUP / CEAU) Susana Ventura (FAUP / CEAU) Teresa Ferreira (FAUP/ CEAU) Authors Panel #1 Pedro Leão Neto Beate Gütschow Katarina Andjelkovic Klauss Borges Panel #2 Iñaki Bergera Bas Princen Ana Miriam Sebastiano Raimondo Apostolos Kyriazis Cristina Gastón Guirao Panel #3 Pedro Gadanho Ana Amado & Andrés Patiño Mariana Von Hartenthal Haode Sun Creative Director Né Santelmo Design Collaborator Edu Silva Impresssão / Printing Printy Apoio / Support UP, FAUP, FCT December, 2019

This paper aims to shed light on the status of travel-photography and is based on the hypothesis that the automobile revolutionized the way architects perceive the city. It focuses on a close examination of the photographs taken by architects John Lautner, Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo Rossi during their travels, with special emphasis on those taken from the automobile and while encountering places for the first time. The main hypothesis that it explores is that the view from the car changes the architecture of the city, as well as the relationship between architecture and the city. It explores this hypothesis through the investigation of the above-mentioned case studies, contributing to a broader understanding of what is happening in cases of photography taken from the car. Regarding the theoretical framework on which my interpretation is based, I could refer to Rosalind Krauss’s understanding of photography in “Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View”. Besides from the photos they thematised in their book entitled AS in DS: An Eye on the Road, depicting landscape views of the British countryside, Alison and Peter Smithson also took many photos during their summer vacations. The main interest of these photos lies in the fact that they employed them in their teaching process and reasoning. The way they treated these photos in order to illustrate their arguments in their teaching, their publications and their projects is an aspect that is scrutinized here. Rossi started taking polaroid photographs during his journeys in the late 1970s, nearly a decade after noting his first impressions in his 47 quaderni azzuri (1968-1986), which are strongly reminiscent of travels diaries, both in form and content. His polaroids, which documented journeys and his whereabouts, include images of boats crossing a river in Bangkok, a Shaker village in Massachussets, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and constitute a visual diary of the Italian architect and an important source for understanding his use of travel-photography in order to organise his “visual memory”. In John Lautner’s archives, tens of thousands of slides can be found, illustrating trips throughout the United States, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, and Egypt. One of my objectives is to show how these photographs of landscapes can inform us on the specific vision that his buildings introduced and vice-versa. Lautner’s travel slides constitute a precious resource since they represent a visual record equivalent to the more usual sketchbook used by many architects to record their study notes. His buildings trigger an ocular-centric vision which cannot but be related to the pre-eminence of landscape views in his conceptual edifice, as emerges not only through his architecture but also through the views captured on his camera when confronted with various landscapes.

2011

Street Art Photography: Mapping the Interstices of Urban Experience and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Art History) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality.

2018

The research would consider the visual quality of urban streetscapes by studying the image of a street which is held by its users. It will concentrate especially on one particular visual quality: the apparent clarity or ‘legibility’ of the streetscape, with regard to the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organised into a coherent pattern. Although clarity and legibility is by no means the only important property of a beautiful streetscape, it is of special importance when considering the environments at the urban scale of size, time, and complexity. A good environment image gives the users a sense of emotional security. He can establish a harmonious relationship between himself and the city. This is the obverse of the fear that comes with disorientation and the chaos of the modern city life. This research is about the look of the streetscapes in a city, and whether this look is of any importance, and whether it can be changed. The urban streetscape, among its many roles, is also something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in. Giving visual form to the city’s streetscapes is a special kind of design problem.

George Perec's Geographies, 2019

In Species of Spaces Georges Perec suggests various ‘Practical exercises’ as a means to investigate the street. The instructions propose its exhaustive exploration through attention to what would be most obvious, common and therefore usually of no interest; to take up this methodology, investigators are told to go about things ‘more slowly, almost stupidly’. As part of his project to reveal and understand the infra-ordinary, in Approaches to what, Perec makes clear that the purpose of such activity is to wrest ‘common things’ from the dross in which they remain mired and to give them a tongue, to ‘speak of what is, of what we are.’ As an artist-scholar researching ‘everyday’ places through essayistic photographic practice, I am drawn to Perec’s specific injunction ‘Force yourself to see more flatly’, which reflects for me photography’s ultimate translation of dimensional space into flat picture plane, and relates to what David Campany has described as modernist photography’s ‘heightened interest in the surfaces of the world’. This contribution emerges from photographic research, which takes up very literally the Perequian practice of seeing flatly, and attending to what is ‘most colourless’: it investigates therefore, via the constraint of black and white image-making, the material surfaces encountered along the 12 minute walk from my home to the tram stop from which I commute to my university job. That Perec makes clear his interest in ‘A town: stone, concrete, asphalt’, and recognises the ‘invisible underground proliferation of conduits’, or the ‘underneath’ of limestone, marl, chalk, gypsum, sand and lignite, encourages me to consider what lies exactly underfoot, passing unremarked on so many daily journeys. This visual essaying of the surface of a place (given that properly speaking an essay is a trial, test or experiment) will be excerpted for the current context, accompanied by a reflection upon Perecquian photographic practice as a method of artistic research, and what a determinedly superficial attention reveals about the infra-ordinariness of place.

Videovortex Reader Inside the YouTube Decade (Institute of Network Cultures), 2020

More than offering a visual immersion, 360 photography and video underline limits of human perception. Incapable of simultaneously seeing in all directions, while having haptic and auditive un-angled perception of reality, these genres surpass the human, perspectival and active view. The multi-focality of a total image is not corresponding to natural human perception, but rather messing it, offering a disinterested and thus non-alive view. Impartial and basically dead, such a view is all but innocent. It is rather a symptom of a new politics of control that cannot be challenged as it acts as if asleep, and cannot be fought against as it is - already dead, convincing us nothing is going on.

Sophia Journal, Volume 4, No. 1 -Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image, 2019

Visual Spaces of Change defines the global theme for this cycle of Sophia which conveys the interest in promoting a critical analysis on how architecture photography, empowered by its leaning and artistic grounding, is as a projective tool of an interdisciplinary nature and an instrument of research and analysis. Unveiling the Transformation of Publicness ensures the speci3city of Sophia´s number that presents articles and other texts focused on the complexity of the city and the role architecture plays in it and how architectural photography is not just an active document but a reactive one; it is the effective instrument of the gaze committed to change. Another important issue that was explored was the inalienable digital nature of the contemporary image of the city that precisely transgresses its own identity through its manipulation and transformation.