Visual Chronicles of Urban Life

To think “the city” is to think “photography.” Like the city, the photograph is in a conflicted state of completeness and incompleteness. The photographic frame, which contains and restrains the flux and flow of reality, stands as a desired statement about the world, event or subject. This idealized state, however, is soon tested by the very reality contained, and so the photograph re-enters the world as an open statement that accumulates new audiences, desires and meanings.

Cities are also idealized expressions of a people, nation or community. Planners, officials and the public strive to give shape to what they understand to be the essence of place or, even more radically, attempt to craft utopian ideals of the city: the City Beautiful, the Garden City, and Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City). However, this vision can never be stable, with the result that, as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida stated in Alphabet City, “A city must remain open to knowing that it does not yet know what it will be.” Like a photograph, a city is realized within a framework where conflicting states of fact and fiction, idealism and reality mingle. What is understood as stable and normal is always fluid and open to other influences, intentions and ideals.

Berenice Abbott, Canyon: Broadway at Exchange Place, 16 July 1936, printed 1979. Gelatin silver print, 48.1 x 38.2 cm. Gift of Rosemary Speirs, Ottawa, 1996, in memory of Alan John Walker, Toronto. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC

Photographs of cities are doubly inflected by these very states of incompleteness and becoming, and as such are often representative of an artist’s attempts to articulate the change and disruptions occurring in the urban fabric at specific moments in history. Berenice Abbott was one such photographer, who photographed New York in the 1930s, a period of immense challenge for the city’s residents and businesses. A great admirer of French photographer Eugène Atget, who crafted elegant and dignified portraits of turn-of-the-20th-century Paris, Abbot emulated her idol by transporting a large-format, 8x10 Century Universal camera, with a 9.5 inch, f6.8 (wide-angle) Goerz Dagor lens, through the streets of New York in search of her subject matter. Unlike Atget, Abbott’s photographs reveal not a grande dame of urbanity, but a city in crisis due to the Depression and rampant development. As certain groups moved out of the inner city to the suburbs, the poverty of those who remained increased, and the destruction of heritage buildings and sites escalated.

Along with her camera's swing, shift, tilt and rise capabilities, Abbott perfectly captured the built environment in such a way as to convey not only the architectural details of buildings but a psychology of place. Buildings rise in behemoth fashion above quotidian concerns, appearing both menacing and modern. Abbott’s photographs function multifariously as documents of heritage, optimistic expressions of future happiness, and expressions of anxiety about changes occurring in the present.

Alvin Langdon Coburn, Street Lights, c.1910. Photogravure, 21.4 x 15.6 cm. Purchased 1971. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC

Abbott’s technically exacting photographs celebrate a sharp focus with high detail. She had little patience with what she termed “arty” or “pretty picture” photography. By contrast, the previous style of photography – pictorialist – was more in keeping with current trends in art at the beginning of the 20th century, favouring moody and atmospheric renderings. Alvin Langdon Coburn’s early photographic career was highly influenced by these ideas, as well as by James McNeill Whistler's nocturne works. City nightlife had become increasingly active due to the relatively new phenomenon of electrical illumination by streetlamps. For artists, such conditions created highlights that appear almost whimsically within broader, darker areas. The city was energized with the glow and reflections of streetlamps in damp streets.

Most importantly, the darkness calmed the city, a contrast to the manic activity of life during the day. The misty atmosphere was also evocative of a deeper, more emotional inner life, as well as a reminder of nature’s presence, in the form of mist, rain and fog. As Coburn wrote in Camera Work (36) "it is only at twilight that the city reveals itself to me in the fullness of its beauty, when the arc lights on the Avenue click into cabs standing at the entrance is just visible. They begin somewhere about Twenty sixth street, where it is darkest, and then gradually the great white globes glow one by one, up past the Waldorf and the new Library, like the stringing of pearls, until they burst out into a diamond pendant at the group of hotels at Fifty-ninth street.”

Fred Herzog, Hastings at Columbia, 1958. Inkjet print, 96.7 x 71.2 cm. CMCP Collection. Purchased 2007. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Estate of Fred Herzog Photo: NGC

Coburn and Abbott expressed the realities of modern urban life both differently and similarly, rendering their vision as moments of stasis, with movement only occasionally present. In general, for most people, the modern city was a site of constant movement and change. The channeling of energy through city streets took shape in the undulations of the crowds, the chimeric fluctuation of reflections in shop windows, and the buzz and glare of neon lights. The urban landscape was exciting and unnerving, in that the individual could be both energized and subsumed by the masses. The modern city structured public spaces in unexpected and dynamic ways and heightened their experience with spectacle and the constant allure of consumer culture.

Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York, c.1939–40. Gelatin silver print, 42.3 × 34.6 cm. Purchased 1986. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © The Lisette Model Foundation, Inc. (1983) Photo: NGC

Vibrant urban existence became expressed through new visual methods and techniques. For example, the appearance of reflections in photographs reveals an artist’s understanding of the complexity of urban experience because the singular point of view is spatially and temporally confounded: what is behind appears entangled with what is front, as seen in the work of Lisette Model. A recent immigrant to the United States, originally from Vienna, Model was captivated by the energy of New York and found store window displays an apt statement of both luxury and the mundane. The enticement of the window-mirror captured the artist's attention early in her career, while photographing on Fifth Ave. “Accidentally I looked into one of those magnificent windows, and then I saw this natural photomontage.” 

Although window displays were not a new subject in photography, Eugène Atget and Walker Evans being precursors, Model excels in the “genre” with her inclusion of the human figure within the frame. The reflection of the city appears on the same pictorial plane as the inward direction of the subject’s gaze, which merges with the consumer items on display. Although the documentary capacity of the photograph provides evidence of the image’s historical context, Model’s resulting montage appears timeless, as if a dream state.

Nathan Lyons, New York City, New York, 1965, printed before April 1970. Gelatin silver print, 16.7 x 11.1 cm. Purchased 1970. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © The Estate of Nathan Lyons Photo: NGC

The siren call of the window display also entranced curator, critic and photographer Nathan Lyons, who stated in 1966 that because “Photography has achieved an unprecedented mirroring of the things of our culture,” we should understand the entirety of photographic images as an “actual environment” or “social landscape.” The mirrored social environment is adeptly rendered in his photograph of a window display that depicts hairstyling images of models arranged as a Jacob’s Ladder of fashion on the cityscape.

Robert Frank, Canal Street – New Orleans, c.1955–56, printed 1968. Gelatin silver print, 27.7 x 35.3 cm. Purchased 1969. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation Photo: NGC

The fragments of life so capably captured through photography become synonymous with the many ways individuals experience the city daily. The numerous attractions and distractions provide a pulse for the city, moving individuals through the streets, stores and public spaces. As seen in the work by Robert Frank, individuality is precariously maintained in the sea of intentions the crowd represents, which he frames as a simultaneous merging of individuals swimming upstream with those swimming down. Harry Callahan takes the fragile state of the individual even further, as the contrary actions of moving up and down the street are conflated into one state of single-minded intention.

Harry Callahan, Randolph Street, Chicago, 1956, printed before 1978. Gelatin silver print, 27.8 x 35.3 cm. Purchased 1978. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © The Estate of Harry Callahan Photo: NGC

At street level, photographers are caught in the whirl of city life and become subject to the very energies they are photographing. One way to be less affected by the bustle of the crowd is to move through the city in vehicles such as cars, buses and subway trains, which – like the camera’s viewfinder – frame reality through windows, as seen in the works of Frank, Sy Kattelson, Bill Vazan, Charles Gagnon and Rosalind Fox Solomon. Another way is to depict the urban landscape as theatre and a backdrop for social and political engagement. In these cases, photographers such as Weegee, Model, Dave Heath and Larry Towell seek out spontaneity and drama, as seen in images of protest and spectacle, when crowds gather to support a cause. Anonymous declarations of intent to unknown audiences also animate the cityscape on graffitied billboards and buildings, and in the public spaces of parks and street gatherings, where people play out their concerns for the camera, as seen in works by Diane Arbus.

Barrie Jones, Lichen Picker, 2010. Inkjet print, 96 x 112 cm. Purchased 2015. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Barrie Jones Photo: NGC

As photographers walk through the urban landscape, their images reveal not only their subject matter, but also the act of looking and creation, which reflects to them their awareness and consciousness. This process also extends to the viewer in the gallery space. As Model notes, “… on pointing my lens towards something, I am posing a question. Photography can be the reply. In other words, it is not me who knows and demonstrates; on the contrary, l am the one who receives the lesson.” The city is revealed in the actions of creation. Model’s comments are reminiscent of an observation made by a character in Clarice Lispector’s novel The Apple in the Dark: “I know why God made rhinoceroses, it’s because He couldn’t see what they looked like, so He made a rhinoceros in order to see it.”

Bibliography: Jacques Derrida, “Generations of a City: memory, prophecy, responsibilities,” Alphabet city, no.6; Meredith Ann TeGrotenhuis Shimizu, Photography in Urban Discourse: Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York and the 1930s, unpubl. Dissertation (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University, 2009); William Sharpe, “New York, Night, and Cultural Mythmaking: The Nocturne in Photography, 1900–25,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art, vol.2, no.3 (Autumn 1988); Ann Thomas, Lisette Model (1990); Nathan Lyons, “Introduction,” Towards a Social Landscape (1966); Cristina Zelich, “A Look Beyond Conventions,” Lisette Model (2009); Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark (2023).

Camera and the City: Photography, the City and Movement is on view at the National Gallery of Canada from December 12, 2025 to March 15, 2025. For related events, please see the calendar. Share this article and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest articles, Gallery exhibitions, news and events, and to learn more about art in Canada.​