Until recently anthropology had been concerned almost exclusively with the study of so-called primitive societies, non-literate people living in non-western worlds with a low level of technological advancement. The distinctive feature of the mode of living of man in the contemporary times is his concentration into gigantic aggregations around which cluster lesser centers and from which radiate the ideas and practices that we call civilization. The cities have an unnatural way of being, these vast metropolises exist not just objectively as financial, political and cultural hubs but also in imaginations in stories, films and photographs. It also inhabits within it multitudes of different parts and communities that inhabit the same space. The theme of this photo series was to encounter the physical space of the city and how London as the financial center of the world manifests itself in the architecture and patterns of daily life. The city suggests an immediacy of experience: the ‘this, here and now.’ It teaches us the arts, the techniques and the tactics of living in the present. What other way to represent the present moment than to photograph it.
Just as physical city is a palimpsest, a complex layering of architectural imaginings that are given a physical reality, destroyed and built over, so we might think of the layering of social visions in which the past remains a force in the present, and also in our present attempts to think of the future. Architecture then becomes the visual moniker of the system. Things and objects change under the gaze of photography. The stillness of a photograph makes everything before the lens a sort of specter, a duplicate version of the real. When buildings are separated from themselves in the medium of photography, they become specters of themselves. This is the condition of modernity.
Modernist architecture is the child of industry and engineering where form follows function. As a form of discourse, built form constructs and frames meanings. Place creation is determined by those in control of resources and is a pursuit of amenity, profit, status and political power. The built environment reflects the identities, differences and struggles of gender, class, race, culture and age. It shows the interests of people in empowerment and freedom, the interests of state in social order, and the private corporate interest in stimulating consumption. It also shapes perception and cognition.
Henri Lefebrvre couples a concern for social constructions of spatial ideology with the importance of lived experience. The concept of space is at once a means of production and a commodity, bot a social product and a means of social reproduction and control. Thus places are both engines of wealth and forms of wealth, we make places and are made by them. London’s architecture is a mix of both old and new, and keeping the imperial past and the modern power intact in the buildings.
The corporate office tower dominates the skyline of nearly all major cities — global building type for the command functions of increasingly global corporation. Tall buildings are a response to market pressure for more rentable space on a given site area. The successful corporate tower offers a distinctive image, a quest that is achieved through uniqueness of form. The ideal tower is a landmark in the literal sense of leaving a mark on the land. High tech images of reflective glass to polished facades of granite and reconstructed stone, it embodies metaphors of strength, stature and strategy, the metonym of physical prominence translating to financial domination. Lefebvre theorizes the monumental vertical built form as phallic: metaphorically it symbolizes force, male fertility, masculine violence — phallic erectility bestows a special status on the perpendicular. One building incorporates ‘a timeless façade of richly ornamented granite’. Stone is an important signifier of permanence and nature, for authentic values that do not change. Small matter that the stone has been crushed and reconstituted to achieve consistent quality across very thin sheets.
London’s space is full of walking arcades and gardens that have been built for flaneury. In the 1930s Benjamin recognized these arcades as the harbinger of a fundamentally new kind of space, an interior dream world of seductive commodities. In contrast to most theorists of his time, Benjamin saw modernity not as enlightenment or demystification but as new mythology. Archaic collective myths steeped in the ideas of the eternal were being replaced by a collective dream of mass culture — the fleeting and dynamic myth of commodity. In the arcades he saw a new integration in the production of space, architecture, commodity and subjectivity. With modern art coming away, photographers began taking interest in the surfaces of the world. A gleaming façade and the cracked hands that built it became the symbols of modern life.
London, from being the capital of the Empire to the global city of now stands tall with all its unabashed wealth and power setting an example for other cities that have developed in the recent years. Cities are from beginning capitalism in embryo. Capitalism as it is believed by many is the natural condition of humanity that confirms to the laws of nature and basic human inclinations. Capitalism is a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labor power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where, because all economic actors are dependent on the market, the requirements of competition and profit maximization are the fundamental rules of life. It is a system uniquely driven to develop the forces of production and to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. The bourgeois then act as an agent of progress. Every human action and activity then becomes tied around capital. Human bodies instead of flourishing according to their own best potential and capabilities become identical and subject to capitalist forces. Real estate becomes the function of market. This geography of and spatial outline gives the citizens of the city a sort of false sense of wellbeing and freedom. One such space is the square or the piazza:
The square of piazza is the epitome of open-mindedness. Here public space is surrounded by a mix of public and private buildings: government offices, museums, lecture and concert hall, churches, shops, cafes, residences.. In the square itself, people meet, walk, talk, buy, sell, argue about politics, eat lunc, sit over coffee, and wait for something to happen. They are different people, with different purposes, educated by the space they share to a civil deportment.
The purpose in this series was more to capture the signs and symbols, lights and shadows of the urban space of the city, than to record the life of the city. I took a rather archaeological approach where pictures of historical buildings, ornamental motifs, vernacular streetscapes become the subject — Juxtaposing, people against empty space, stressing contrast between black and white, the three dimensional and the flat, the curved and the straight, melancholic play between present and past, intangible and the real, the timeless and the transient.
Process:
New to the city of London, I wanted to do this project as a way to get used to the space of the city. Coming from Mumbai and Delhi, India where the space is more condensed and tight, London was not just different in spatial layout but I was also sometimes struck with dejavu of how the street corners and buildings reminded me of some areas in the Indian cities due to its colonial past. I chose the city center as the location for the project as this is where the strength and power of the city resides. Michel de Certeau, differentiates between space and place. Space is practiced place. In his chapter “Walking in the city” in the Practice of everyday life he describes the city that people inhabit as a labyrinthine reality which produces anthropological, poetic and mythic experiences of space.
Since the idea was to capture the city’s hard, rough concrete space and the loneliness and alienation that people face on a daily basis, I chose to just take my camera and point at what I could see on the streets.
Georg Simmel, a German sociologist talks about how the personality of an individual accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces of a city. “The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and the value in order to transform them from their subjective form in to the form of a purely objective life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formation of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit.”
For me, London came with a lot of freedom but also lack of pathos on the streets made the city a little distant and inaccessible. This is the uncomfortable freedom of the metropolis where individual agency is enacted within the field of possibilities realized by this real-imagined environment: its space, its population, its technologies, its symbolization. The city remained inescapably strange and opaque, often oppressive. Yet it provided the texture of our experience and the fabric of liberty.
