looking through The city is made of details. These exist at all scales, in all directions, and in all forms. Materials, movements, temporalities, interactions, separations, layers of connections, and light come together to create, destroy, define, and disperse these details throughout the urban fabric, constructing experiences and identities that are at once ubiquitous and singular, generalizable and idiosyncratic. The city stands on its own, and yet it is built from the agglomeration of each of its moments and details. These are frozen in photography from day to day, yet they change from moment to moment. Each brick seems stagnant in time, captured in an instant forever. But the city also moves and lives, as do the people who inhabit it. These moments are but glimpses into the city, slices of time meant both to document reality but also to expose the change, to reveal the details of those spaces and those moments, of those materials and those people. It is then the case that the act of photography, the act of documentation and of exposure, is also the act of creating images that can showcase the details of the city. It is further the act of curating and constructing narratives from these details, as the photographer - just like the city, its details, and all those who move through it - exists in moments across time. To act in particular moments in time and space, to create particular images that highlight particular details and experiences within the city, is by its very nature an act of both creation and destruction. An act of highlighting certain this is also one of erasing others. The act of photography is thus a political act. This is not only by choice, but rather it is by necessity.
To look through is to create narrative relationships across the details of the city. It is to recognize photography as a political act of erasure. It is to reverse engineer the action of photography to expose to action of architecture and of the city, to expose details by stepping beyond the facade, beyond the street, beyond the building, and into the spaces between, behind, and within. This exploration is an attempt to reveal, through an investigation of the spaces between, behind, and within, what can be seen when we look through the city, not simply at it. New York and Rio de Janeiro are the subjects. Each city acts as the subject of an independent investigation into the details of its formal, social, and structural milieus. The interaction of these subjects, and of the photographs in this project reveals relationships and distinctions across cities, countries, and continents. Finally, looking through is an experiment in low-fi photography. All images here were taken and edited using an iPhone 7 camera. With the limitations of the camera in mind, each image was constructed consciously to take advantage of what it does well. James Piacentini - M.Arch / Ms.UP Student Architectural Photography I, Spring 2017 - Professor Chenriette Attali Columbia University - Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
new york city New York City never sleeps, but it is also a slumbering beast, drowned by its own reality, entrenched in the new, the old, and everything in between. Looking through New York City means looking past the city that never sleeps and finding the slumbering beast. With a population of nearly 9 million people, New York City is also a place of immense density and interaction. It is a city in which layers of architectural history are present at every corner of every neighborhood. During multiple sessions across three weeks, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, Morningside Heights and Harlem, and central Manhattan were targeted for exploration. I sought to look through the density of the city toward the moments of intimacy that exist between buildings, behind the gates, or within the shadows.
The process of looking through began quite literally: by looking through fences, openings, and apertures in the city. These images thus reveal the basic nature of looking through by documenting the relationships between what is before and what is behind. Time is an essential piece of the urban puzzle, interacting in tandem with space. Looking through may only happen during certain moments in time, as well as in particular moments in space. Light, shadow, and material are the parameters with which to judge the efficacy of such moments.
Looking through to moments that could be...
And to those that may never be...
The relationship between shadow, light, and foreground begins to emerge.
So do the slivers of space beyond the city, the moments of sky, the details hidden between the edges of material structure. From between these gaps the true charge and materiality of the city emerges, revealing details hidden in plain sight.
Details are hidden in alleyways, or storefront facades. They are hidden in shadows cutting across brick walls, in lines and light, in people who cast themselves unknowingly against the sun.
rio de janeiro Rio de Janeiro is one of the most complex urban systems on earth. With hundreds of years of entrenched spatial segregation operating as a sequence of schisms across the city, Rio’s formal urbanism and informal favela network are quite literally two cities in one. This separation is also clear in the relationship between the urban form and the geography of the city, where the dense urban jungle is matched only by the green jungles which surround it, the dark stone cliffs which frame it, and the blue waters of the bay. In the shadows of the recent mega events, such as the World Cup and the Summer Olympic Games, Rio’s organic urbanism provides a backdrop for the exploration of details hidden between the cracks of a city built of cities, each changing from day to day.
Here, as with so many cities, looking through is the only way to see what truly exists, to see beyond the moments.
Here, similar formal grammars emerge within and between the city’s many streets and neighborhoods, revealing the complex relationship between formality and informality, structure and space.
Dialogues begin between structure and the space it creates, formed always by light. Light and shadow reveal architecture as a window through which to view space and the city behind. Architecture is both subject and void, a canvas for details, and a frame to create understandings of the urban fabric between, behind, and within.
Details are structural. They are light, and form and space.
And they are the people who choose to look through to find them.