Urban Experience with Rosemary Hawker

“The city has always been a ready subject for photography, its accelerating change coinciding with the mid-nineteenth-century invention of the medium. As such, photography has played a constant role in understanding urban experience.” (Hawker, 2013)

Rosemary Hawker’s article ‘Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience’, from The History of Photography, attempts to explore the typical contemporary photographic discourse of the street, and how photographers are using the ‘trope of the banal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’’ that typifies this idea. There is a distinct direction in this writing towards discussion heavily leaning towards the street and the urban experience, which may be a little off topic with reference to urbanisation and the human imprint on the natural environment. However, the ‘rejected romantic inflection of modernism in favour of a supposedly detached and styleless treatment of the built environment’ that was embodied in works by photographers such as The New Topographics (especially Robert Adams (Image 1), Stephen Shore and Bernd and Hilla Becher)2 hits right in the gut of our topic of discussion, about how and why photographers have sought out landscape images that capture and explore the relationship between the natural and urban environment, whilst commenting on human involvement.  

Image 1.
© Robert Adams - 'Tract House, Westminster, Colorado', 1973 Museum purchase, George Eastman House Collections

Hawker’s essay describes ‘contemporary photographs of the city…[as]…often curiously empty and still, a condition made emphatic in Jeff Wall’s Dawn (Image 2).

Image 2. Jeff Wall, 'Dawn',
transparency in lightbox, 2001.

Such images work against the more familiar image of a densely peopled and dynamic city that excited early modernist photographers and that has informed the genre of street photography ever since (Image 3).’ 

Her argument is constructed for us to see that ‘one could learn much from studying the actual process of urbanisation to understand the relations played out through this photographic trope’. And that ‘the numbing emptiness of the city as found in so many contemporary photographs can in part be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form and a popular cultural practice’. That is to say, that celebrating the everyday has already been ‘so widely embraced and repeated, as to become generic’.

Image 3. Paul Strand, 'Fifth Avenue at 42nd

Street', New York, platinum print, 1915.

 © Aperture Foundation Inc.,
Paul Strand Archive.

Hawker explains with some examples, just how the literal and banal came to be captured by many contemporary photographers:

"The photograph as transformative or illuminating has been widely celebrated. For example, John Szarkowski writes:

on the evidence of Thomas Roma’s pictures – the light comes down with such sweet sympathy that asphalt shingles and cyclone fences are shown to be as fine as marble, and [. . .] the weeds in vacant lots make us think of Eden.3

This too easy transformation and the overblown and overfamiliar rhetoric for which it has become an occasion is what contemporary photographers who pursue the banal eschew." (Hawker, 2013)

The above is an example of how the focus was drawn away from the magical and the spectacular, towards the everyday street as an acute site for understanding contemporary experiences of the city. 

Rosemary Hawker’s article delves far into the modernist and contemporary angles of urban and street photography. From the ‘formation of the city as empty or full’, to the ‘disciplinary formations of photography in the vernacular or art photography’; and, perhaps most intently, about the urban landscape ‘as an acute site of urban experience’. This is inherently linked to the figures that do or do not occupy space in the image and the reasons why they are or are not included, each ‘offering a solution to the problem that the everyday city has become for photographers – one that simultaneously acknowledges the complex history of its subjects, both the city and photography’. 

1. Hawker, R., 2013, 'Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience', History of Photography, vol. 37, no. 3, pp 341-352

2. Jenkins, W. 1975, 'New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape',

Exhibition Catalogue, Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography at

George Eastman House

3. Szarkowski, J., cited in Roma, T., Brooklyn, New York:

W. W. Norton 1996, back bookcover.