Disseminating Architecture: Week 3: Aerial View

Oblivion 7N, 2004 - David Maisel

This week we will be looking at the view of the city from above, both near and far.
While preparing your 5 minute presentation on your selected aerial topic/photographer, read Vittoria di Palma's essay 'Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy' from the book she co-edited, 'Intimate Metropolis: Constructing Public and Private in the Modern City'.
Also read 'The Synoptic View': Aerial Photographs and Twentieth-Centry Planning by Tanis Hinchcliffe from the book Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, edited by Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray.
Post your 300 word response to the City:Assembled Panorama on the blog before our next session on Wednesday 11th at 11am (in the workshop room to accommodate numbers).

The Encounters

'What is a camera? "why do people take photographs?" I am always brought back to this very basic question when I take photographs or think about photography.'
- Daido Moriyama







As part of 'A Day in the Light' workshop for now what?, we were talking about how to photograph a place that has been photographed and re-photographed countless times by tourists...Mohammedreza Mirzaei's 'The Encounters 2007-08' came to mind.
Here, he addresses this by photographing the tourists who are in turn photographing the place...








"What emerges is the idea that people seem locked into their insatiable craving to take pictures while on holiday more so than the actual experience of the spectacle itself."
-Tim Clark, Editor and director of 1000 words

"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel."
- Susan Sontag - On Photography (1977):