The Individual and the City - A Reader

AS level Photography

The Individual and the City

A Reader

The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a dub. For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world- in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and brightly lit country-but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modem world. And the gangster-though there are real gangsters - is also and primarily, a creature of the imagination. The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster; he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.

Robert Warshow, 1958

Just here the philosopher who believes in the salutary nature of vast daydreams is faced with a problem: how can one help confer greater cosmicity upon the city space that is exterior to one's room? As an example, here is one dreamer's solution to the problem of noise in Paris: When insomnia, which is the philosopher's ailment, is increased through irritation caused by city noises; or when, late at night, the hum of automobiles and trucks rumbling through the Place Maubert causes me to curse my citydweller's fate, I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean. We all know that the big city is a clamorous sea, and it has been said countless times that, in the heart of night in Paris, one hears the ceaseless murmur of Hood and tide. So I make a sincere image out of these hackneyed ones, an image that is as much my own as though I myself had invented it, in line with my gentle mania for always believing that I am the subject of what I am thinking. If the hum of cars becomes more painful, I do my best to discover in it the roll of thunder, of a thunder that speaks to me and scolds me. And I feel sorry for myself. So there you are, unhappy philosopher, caught up again by the storm, by the storms of life! I dream an abstract-concrete daydream. My bed is a small boat lost at sea; that sudden whistling is the wind in the sails. On every side the air is filled with the sound of furious klaxoning. I talk to myself to give myself cheer: there now, your skiff is holding its own, you are safe in your stone boat. Sleep, in spite of the storm. Sleep in the storm. Sleep in your own courage, happy to be a man who is assailed by wind and wave.

And I fall asleep, lulled by the noise of Paris.

Gaston Bachelard from The Poetics of Space, 1958

Robinson in Two Cities Cities of architecture and scaffolding, tower blocks taking the temperature, external elevator-cars outpacing window-cleaning cages, projects and broken deadlines, Robinson near the station. All routes end here. Cities of junctions and ring roads, inside lanes peeling off to the left shunting traffic into neighbourhoods, districts, Robinson on the loop bus, his third lap. Cranes making the skyline.

Cities of offences against the person, taxis and sirens and crossing the street from nowhere to nowhere, Robinson on foot. Cities at dusk, each outpointing the other with starlings. A choice of evening papers, the bridge, and later with his tightrope act along the ledge, Robinson in two minds.

Simon Armitage from Kid, 1992

Finally there was a series of maps, noticeable by their blue-and-white striped covers, which divided the city into five manageable sections, none of them, unfortunately, overlapping. The hotel was in the top quarter of map two, an expensive, inefficient restaurant at the foot of map three.

The bar towards which they were now walking was in the centre of map four, and it was only when they passed a kiosk shuttered and battened for the night, that Colin remembered that they should have brought the map. Without them they were certain to get lost.

However, he said nothing. Mary was several feet ahead, walking slowly and evenly as though measuring out a distance. Her arms were folded and her head was lowered, defiantly contemplative. The narrow passageway had brought them on to a large, flatly lit square, a plain of cobbles, in the centre of which stood a war memorial of massive, rough-hewn granite blocks-assembled to form a gigantic cube, topped by a soldier casting away his rifle. This was familiar, this was the starting point for nearly all their expeditions. But for a man stacking chairs outside a cafe watched by a dog and, further off, another man, the square was deserted.

They crossed diagonally and entered a wider street of shops selling televisions, dishwashers and furniture. Each store prominently displayed its burglar-alarm system. It was the total absence of traffic in the city that allowed visitors the freedom to become so easily lost. They crossed streets without looking and, on impulse, plunged down narrower ones because they curved tantalizingly into darkness, or because they were drawn by the smell of frying fish. There were no signs. Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour‌ Ian McEwan from The Comfort of Strangers, 1981

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon .a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

T.S. Eliot Collected Poems, 1936

Wishing to take a last look by himself at the city from which he had fled half a century before, the old man declined to let the writer accompany him back to his hotel. But the writer followed him in secret (as he often did with friends as well as strangers). Unobserved, he trailed close behind him across the squares, across the bridge, and then along the opposite bank. Although the translator, with his bobbing head and the hopping movements of a hare, seemed to be hurrying, his shadower, much as he had already slackened his pace, had to stop from time to time, for the old man not only zigzagged as though drunk but also paused every few steps to shift his bag with the translated manuscript to the other hand or set it down. It wasn't exactly a bag, but a wide, rectangular basket with a handle and a black leather lid that glittered like pitch in the light of every street lamp. What could be in it that's so heavy? And the writer saw it as the basket in which Miriam entrusted the infant Moses to the river Nile in the hope of saving him from the King's myrmidons. As far as the hotel door he had eyes only for the floating, bobbing basket in which lay hidden the infant Moses on his way to Pharaoh's daughter.

Peter Handke from The Afternoon of a Writer, 1991

In the city, we are barraged with images of the people we might become. Identity is presented as plastic, a matter of possessions and appearances; and a very large proportion of the urban landscape is taken up by slogans, advertisements, flatly photographed images of folk heroes-the man who tamed into a sophisticated dandy overnight by drinking a particular brand of vodka, the girl who transformed herself into a latter day Mata Hari with a squirt of cheap scent. The tone of the wording of these advertisements is usually pert and facetious, comically drowning in its own hyperbole. But the photographs (and photography has largely replaced drawing in this business of image-projection) are brutally exact: they reproduce every detail of a style of life, down to the brand of cigarette-lighter, the stone in the ring, and the economic row of books on the shelf. Yet, if one studies a line of ads across from where one is sitting in a tube train, these images radically conflict with each other.

Swap the details about between the pictures, and they are instantly made illegible. If the characters they represent really are heroes, then they dearly have no individual claim to speak for society as a whole. The clean-cut and the shaggy, rakes, innocents, brutes, home-lovers, adventurers, clowns, all compete for our attention and invite emulation. As a gallery, they do provide a glossy mirror of the aspirations of a representative city crowd; but it is exceedingly hard to discern a single dominant style, an image of how most people would like to see themselves.

Jonathan Raban from Soft City, 1974

'. . . The wall gives its voice to that part of man which, without it, would be condemned to silence . . . The remainder of a primitive existence of which the wall may be one of the most faithful mirrors. Graffiti is our state of civilisation, our primitive art. . .'

'Since I began photographing graffiti, contemporary art has given rise to an event of historic significance, perhaps as important as the Cubist movement, that of the realisation of the wall by the greater number of our artists. . .Art and correlatively the history of art has returned to its origins, to the art of all ages, and above all to archaic arts, to instinctive gestures, to primordial marks. Graffiti reaches the heart of the burning problems of our age. It is also understandable why most of them remind us of the lost civilisations Peruvian, pre-Columbian, Mexican, or even more ancient cultures - and at the same time remind us also of the works of Picasso, Klee, Rouault.

'The world of the graffiti sums up the whole of life in three leading themes: birth, love, death. Birth: the image of man, spelt and identified for the first time. Love: under its two aspects, carnal and romantic. Death: decomposition, annihilation and adventure. Animism, always present, calls up not only warriors, heroes, animals, but also devils, wizards, fauns, phallic gods, monsters, half-brute, half-human creatures. This strange universe of signs, figures, symbols and even spells and witchcraft - of which many traces can be discovered - still persists today under the electric sky of our cities.'

Brassai: Language of the Wall.

Brassai La mort (Death) n.d.

CROWDS IT IS not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is an art; and only that man can gorge himself with vitality, at the expense of the human race, whom, in his cradle, a fairy has inspired with love of disguise and of the mask, with hatred of the home and a passion for voyaging.

Multitude, solitude : terms that, to the active and fruitful poet, are synonymous and interchangeable. A man who cannot people his solitude is no less incapable of being alone in a busy crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege that he can, at will, be either himself or another. Like those wandering spirits that seek a body, he enters, when he likes, into the person of any man. For him alone all is vacant; and if certain places seem to be closed to him, it is that, to his eyes, they are not worth the trouble of being visited.

The solitary and pensive pedestrian derives a singular exhilaration from this universal communion. That man who can easily wed the crowd knows a feverish enjoyment which will be eternally denied to the egoist, shut up like a trunk, and to the lazy man, imprisoned like a mollusc. The poet adopts as his own all the professions, all the joys and all the miseries with which circumstance confronts him. What men call love is very meagre, very restricted and very feeble, compared to this ineffable orgy, to this holy prostitution of the soul that abandons itself entirely, poetry and charity included, to the unexpected arrival, to the passing stranger.

Charles Baudelaire from ‘Crowds’ one of Twenty Prose Poems

Street Scene A blind little boy With a paper sign Pinned to his chest.

Too small to be out Begging alone, But there he was.

This strange century With its slaughter of the innocent, Its flight to the moon And now he waiting for me In a strange city, On a street where I lost my way.

Hearing me approach, He took a rubber toy Out of his mouth As if to say something, But then he didn't.

It was a head, a doll's head, Badly chewed, Held high for me to see.

The two of them grinning at me.

Charles Simic from Frightening Toys, 1995

A Step Away from Them It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust.

On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating.

A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight.

I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.

And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab.

There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, the Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?

And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines and nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they’ll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there.

A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

Frank O’Hara from Lunch Poems 1964

CITIES & SIGNS 3 The man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theatre, the bazaar. In every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes' palaces, the high priests' temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. This - some say - confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.

This is not true of Zoe. In every point of this city you can, in turn, sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles. Any one of its pyramid roofs could cover the leprosarium or the odalisques' baths. The traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts: he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle. He infers this: if existence in all its moments is all of itself. Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?

Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities, 1974

There's...There's no one.

There's a park bench at the edge of a path through a square.

And its shadow.

There's...There's no one.

There's a lagoon behind the table of a cafe. The sea is blue.

The waves break in the distance, probably on reefs. Or lap the sand, the beach beneath palm trees which the wind ruffles like feathers. A lamp with its bulb protected by a glass globe is stuck in the sky, at the end of a thinning cloud.

There's...There's no one.

Deserted places. Abandoned objects. Nothing is of any use any more. Nothing is of any use to anyone. A sort of indifference. Or absence. No one.

A tower collapses in dust swollen like foam between poplars and street lights. No one.

A double door is barred by a chain. No one. Or shadows going past. Semblances.

These are napes of necks on an escalator. Hair, short, brown, blonde, long, white. Napes following, going past each other. Napes which Time is hurrying along. Time for an appointment, suburban train timetables.

Or this is an old man, behind an escalator banister, hands in pockets. Looking sadly at...This is an old man going by.

Another escalator. A woman coming down. The fingers of the gloves held tight in her hands depict the shadow of a little rabbit on the tiles of the underground escalator. Which she doesn't see. Which no one sees. She goes by. Indifferent.

Indifference of a young man in Bermuda shorts leaning against a wall bending over a programme. Just to fool time.

Pascal Bonafoux from the introduction to Edges: photographs by Dolorès Marat

1 Through the crash barrier SOON after three o'clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland's skull. During the few seconds before his crash he clutched at the whiplashing spokes of the steering wheel, dazed by the impact of the chromium window pillar against his head. The car veered from side to side across the empty traffic lanes, jerking his hands like a puppet's.

The shredding tyre laid a black diagonal stroke across the white marker lines that followed the long curve of the motorway embankment. Out of control, the car burst through the palisade of pinewood trestles that formed a temporary barrier along the edge of the road. Leaving the hard shoulder, the car plunged down the grass slope of the embankment. Thirty yards ahead, it came to a halt against the rusting chassis of an overturned taxi. Barely injured by this violent tangent that had grazed his life, Robert Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights.

J.G. Ballard from Concrete Island, 1973

The Camera Eye (47)

sirens bloom in the fog over the harbor horns of all colors everyshaped whistles reach up from the river and the churn of screws the throb of engines bells the steady broken swish of waves cut by prows out of the unseen stirring fumblingly through the window tentacles stretch tingling to release the spring tonight start out ship somewhere join up sign on the dotted line enlist become one of hock the old raincoat of incertitude (in which you hunch alone from the upsidedown image on the retina painstakingly out of color shape words remembered light arid dark straining to rebuild yesterday to clip out paper figures to simulate growth warp newsprint into faces smoothing and wrinkling in the various barelyfelt velocities of time) tonight now the room fills with the throb and hub-bub of departure the explorer gets a few necessities together coaches himself on a beginning better the streets first a stroll uptown downtown along the wharves under the el peering into faces in taxicabs at the drivers of trucks at old men chewing in lunchrooms at drunk bums drooling puke in alleys what's the newsvender reading? what did the elderly wop selling chestnuts whisper to the fat woman behind the picklejars? where is she going the plain girl in a red hat running up the subway steps and the cop joking the other cop across the street? and the smack of a kiss from two shadows under the stoop of the brownstone house and the grouchy faces at the streetcomer suddenly gaping black with yells at the thud of a blow a whistle scampering feet the event? tonight now

John Dos Passos from The Big Money, 1937

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holbom Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as fullgrown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-comers, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Charles Dickens from Bleak House, 1853

THE MAN IN SPECTACLES They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and coarse, thick sandwiches at a coffee-stall, and then, made their way across the river, which under the grey and growing light looked as desolate as Acheron. They reached the bottom of the huge block of buildings which they had seen from across the river, and began in silence to mount the naked and numberless stone steps, only pausing now and then to make short remarks on the rail of the banister.

At about every other flight they passed a window; each window showed them a pale and tragic dawn lifting itself laboriously over London. From each the innumerable roofs of slate looked like the leaden surges of a grey troubled sea after rain. Syme was increasingly conscious that his new adventure had somehow a quality of cold sanity worse than the wild adventures of the past Last night, for instance, the tall tenements had seemed to him like a tower in a dream. As he now went up the weary and perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself.

G.K. Chesterton from The Man Who was Thursday, 1908

The next morning, and for many mornings to follow, Quinn posted himself on a bench in the middle of the traffic island at Broadway and 99th Street. He would arrive early, never later than seven o'clock, and sit there with a take-out coffee, a buttered roll, and an open newspaper on his lap, watching the glass door of the hotel. By eight o'clock Stillman would come out, always in his long brown overcoat, carrying a large, old-fashioned carpet bag. For two weeks this routine did not vary. The old man would wander through the streets of the neighborhood, advancing slowly, sometimes by the merest of increments, pausing, moving on again, pausing once more, as though each step had to be sum total of steps. Moving in this manner was difficult for Quinn.

He was used to walking briskly, and all this starting and stopping and shuffling began to be a strain, as though the rhythm of his body was being disrupted. He was the hare in pursuit of the tortoise, and again and again he had to remind himself to hold back.

What Stillman did on these walks remained something of a mystery to Quinn. He could, of course, see with his own eyes what happened, and all these things he dutifully recorded in his red notebook. But the meaning of these things continued to elude him. Stillman never seemed to be going anywhere in particular, nor did he seem to know where he was. And yet, as if by conscious design, he kept to a narrowly circumscribed area, bounded on the north by 110th Street, on the south by 72nd Street, on the west by Riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue. No matter how haphazard his journeys seemed to be – and each day his itinerary was different- Stillman never crossed these borders.

Paul Auster from City of Glass, 1985

He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps.

That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear!

Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if nothing could move them? Such moments come to all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon humanity to artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints. A despicable emotional state this, against which solitude fortifies a superior character; and with severe exultation the Professor thought of the refuge of his room, with its padlocked cupboard, lost in a wilderness of poor houses, the hermitage of the perfect anarchist. In order to reach sooner the point where he could take his omnibus, he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and dusky alley paved with flagstones. On one side the low brick houses had in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of incurable decay empty shells awaiting demolition. From the other side life had not departed wholly as yet. Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand-furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. The only human being making use of the alley besides the Professor, coming stalwart and erect from the opposite direction, checked his swinging pace suddenly.

'Hallo!' he said, and stood a little on one side watchfully.

The Professor had already stopped, with a ready half turn which brought his shoulders very near the other wall. His right-hand fell lightly on the back of the outcast couch, the left remained purposefully plunged deep in the trouser pocket‌ Joseph Conrad from The Secret Agent, 1907