Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Readings for Sep 14
No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 18-21.
Eric Gordon, Chapter 5: “The Operative City: The Machine Intelligence of Urban
Renewal,” The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google
(Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2010), pp. 125-152.
Readings for Sept 21
Anthropological Issues in Cities and Mass Communication,” American Anthropologist,
Vol. 103, No. 1, (March 2001), pp. 96-111.
Nezar AlSayyad, “Preface,” “Introduction: The Cinematic City and the Quest for the
Modern,” and Chapter 3: “Orwellian Modernity: Utopia/Dystopia and the City of the
Future Past,” in AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to
Real (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. xi - 18, 72-96.
Andreas Huyssen. “The Vamp and the Machine” in M. Minden and H. Bachmann (Eds).
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Rochester: Camden,
2000.
Anton Kaes, “The Phantasm and the Apocalypse: Metropolis and Weimar Modernity,” in
Gyan Prakash, ed., Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 17-30.
Chicago Architecture Foundation
Extended Due to Popular Demand!
COST Free and open to the public
HOURS 7 days a week from 9am-6:30pm
LOCATION Atrium Gallery, 224 South Michigan Avenue
How does a region as vast and complex as Chicago take shape? What are the goals of officials, real estate developers, corporations, and citizens who structure urban life? Chicago Model City tells the stories behind the planning of Chicago.
Rapid growth, innovative design, and a diverse population helped make Chicago a symbol of the modern city. Beyond this, Chicago became a model: a means of understanding cities and citizens everywhere. This exhibition explores Chicago’s role as a model for city-building.
The centerpiece of Chicago Model City is a 320-square-foot model of downtown that enables you to see Chicago as you’ve never seen it before. It is the only accurate and up-to-date model of the city.
Chicago Model City also features a unique 1950s model of the Eisenhower Expressway and Blue Line; a digital visualization of demolition and rebuilding on Chicago’s Near South Side; a model portraying the green renovation of the Willis Tower; a visualization of runway expansions at O’Hare International Airport; and an exploration of the 1909 Plan of Chicago.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Notes on Susan Sontag, On Photography
Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality, that anyone can make or acquire.
as a mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power
The industrialization of photography permitted its rapid absorption into rational—that is, bureaucratic—ways of running society. …photographs became part of the general furniture of the environment---touchstones and confirmations of that reductive approach to reality which is considered realistic
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
To photograph is to confer importance.
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Readings for 9/7
September 7
Theory and Background
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), pp. 3-82.
Stefanie Harris, “Rilke, Photography, and the City,” New German Critique, No. 99, (Fall,
2006), pp. 121-149
Eric Gordon, Chapter 1: “More Than the Sum of its Parts: The White City and Amateur
Photography,” in The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google
(Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2010), pp. 21-42.
Suggested background reading: Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of
American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).