How do images (re)produce cities? Seeking to capture the real, the objective and the immediate, the history of photography is invariably linked to the history of urban development in the 19^th century. Where the Industrial Revolution and modernity saw cities grow at unprecedented rates, it also championed the creation and proliferation of new technologies such as photography. A new perspective was being shaped not only through these technologies which reduced nature to converging perspective lines and infinite horizons; but through the renewal of cities, with old quarters demolished to make room for new order of modernisation. Moreover, the very first photographs were of cities since early photographic technology relied on slow exposure times, also meaning most urban photography was primarily of a survey or architectural character presenting an objective view.

This intricate relationship, between the 'objective view' of photography, mapped onto the lived realities of the city and its production is the starting point for an exhibition at V&A Dundee, Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World, on view from March 29 - October 27, 2024. Whether it has been for reasons of surveillance, documenting through 'straight photography', tourism and advertisement, or serving as visual evidence for photojournalism, photographs have an impact on our perceptions of the urban. Providing an exhaustive account of this history, the exhibition showcases photographs, films and other paraphernalia from the V&A’s archive. The curators not only hope to survey the history of photography and its relationship to the built environment but also how the medium does more than just document city life. Beginning with the first aerial surveys of cities, the exhibition introduces visitors to the rise of aerial photography with the invention of the hot air balloon, through a French photographer, Nadar, popularising this form and filing a patent for aerial surveys in 1856.

The technique of aerial surveillance would then be adopted by the military in the late 19th century as a tool for capturing the latest images of the enemy’s terrain. Today, the most popular forms of such imagery are Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View. The exhibition includes works by artists such as Jenny Odell, who shed new light on social, environmental and geopolitical concerns with the use of aerial imagery.

A new portrait of Dundee by Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino, commissioned for the design museum's showcase highlights the importance of the aerial view to understanding the scale of the city today, while at the same time subverting this tradition. Part of Nishino's Diorama Map series, which also includes New York, Paris, London, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, the photographic collage that looks like a satellite image reveals details of the streets, buildings, people and events on closer inspection.

Speaking about the showcase, "In this exhibition, visitors will have the chance to see iconic city photography by some of the most acclaimed photographers in history," says Meredith More, curator at V&A Dundee, "[And] visitors will also encounter exciting work by contemporary architects, photographers and artists who question the ways images shape and mediate our daily lives." The history of photography centres on how images have been used to represent and understand the world, with the first photographic instrument being the camera obscura, a window and a pinhole with which to re-present our surroundings. As some early uses of the medium in the exhibition such as stereograms and dioramas show, these representations stemmed from a fascination to recreate nature and, in some form, control how it was framed. In a way, these technologies mirror our current fascination with the far-off locations we see on social media. Walter Benjamin, the primary theorist of the new technology, posited that it would destroy the 'aura' of the work of art; in this instance, it worked to create icons of architectural marvels instead.

The section Photo Opportunities begins by tracing the early history of the medium with William Henry Fox Talbot’s image of Sir Walter Scott’s Monument in Edinburgh. Through various examples of how photographs would come to be used as tools to survey the built environment, the curation within the exhibition space also hopes to show how these images then influenced the design of cities. For instance, with a particular focus on Scotland in the displayed works, Thomas Annan’s images of the overcrowded closes around Glasgow Cross are included, which Annan was commissioned to take by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust in 1866. This documentation would legitimise the replacement of the Crosses with new modern developments. This almost “investigative” quality of the photographer—capturing what in the case of the city had dilapidated and was to be renewed, put into order—is perhaps best exemplified by French photographer Eugène Atget. Working at the close of the 19^th century, Atget photographed the sectors of Paris that would eventually be torn down as part of the massive modernisation project by Haussmann; with the images he took working as studies for painters, architects and stage designers.

This style of street photography, where streets and the transformation of cities were photographed sans people, emerged with photographers such as Berenice Abbott (who was hugely influenced by Atget) and Brassaï as a way to make sense of the rapid transformation of the urban fabric. This desire would also manifest in the possibilities opened up by the downward gaze of the lens, where the horizon would disappear, cities becoming an abstract composition of forms and people as seen in Fred Zinnemann’s image of the construction of the Rockefeller Centre. Such a frame of an endless city with no horizon would also become emblematic of modernity.

On the other hand, the development of handheld cameras allowed photographers to not only make sense of the city but also to capture how urban spaces influenced lived realities. Through the newly emerging style of street photography, artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson captured the dynamic realities of fast-growing metropolises. In a way, these also shaped new perspectives and theories on urbanism and urban design, with a stronger focus on human-centred design, such as Jane Jacobs' text The Death and Life of Great American Cities (on display in the exhibition space).

The emergence of street photography as a popular style coincided with the rise of photojournalism. Images by documentary photographers now garnered more power than words in displaying the truth. Magazines such as LIFE and newspapers began to rely heavily on visual content, particularly photographs, to tell stories and capture the attention of readers. Images and text in conjunction would further inspire photographs to serve as powerful visual evidence, revealing the vast difference in the living conditions in certain parts of the city. As the works on display show, social activists would use the camera as a powerful tool to reveal the social injustice, poverty and suffering in marginalised communities and, hence lobby for reform.

This would be particularly relevant in the post-war era. The exhibition includes the British photographer Roger Mayne’s Southam Street series, where he photographs local communities in west London, capturing the lives of women, teenagers and Black migrants who were negotiating their place in British working class culture at this time; Nigel Henderson’s images of children playing in east London, which the architects Alison and Peter Smithson would use in collages to argue for a new spatial configuration to housing which redefined relationships between house, street, district and city; the works of Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand who documented dynamic street life in New York City; and Nick Hedges’ Shelter Campaign, where Hedge spent four years captured the impacts of appalling housing conditions across the UK.

Where photojournalism was the representation of an objective reality, this capturing of a fleeting moment through touristy photographs makes cities into a purely visual experience. Some might argue that the photograph turns the city into a constant spectacle, dictating what makes the city instead of the city making the image. Who could think of Paris without thinking of the Eiffel Tower, who could think of New York without the iconic skyline? These images and the circulation of these—some of which like the Eiffel Tower were created specifically with the photograph in mind—show another way by which image technology shapes cities today.

Within the displayed works, Édouard Baldus' 1850s French Monuments Commission traces the historical lineage of the documentation of landmarks of the city, visually encapsulating French cultural identity. This fascination with the iconic and the exotic could also be linked to the creation and collection of postcards in the Victorian era, where people collected these in the 1850s and 1860s before most people owned personal cameras. Popular postcards by entrepreneurs such as Francis Frith (on display in the gallery) were also instrumental in perpetuating an Orientalist depiction of places outside of Europe as exotic and unfamiliar and helped to build the prejudiced perceptions of many cultures that persist today.

Further, the exhibition expands on what photography is by including contemporary imaging technologies such as GPS, drones, gaming technology and lidar scanning, as More explains. To this end, another commission for the exhibition is a collaborative video game called Gimbal City, designed by architectural studio, iheartblob. The interactive installation allows visitors to create a city through various degrees of collaboration as part of its gameplay.

In an image-saturated world, the question becomes, is the city being photographed or turning into a photograph itself? Perhaps a redundant question today, with cities inundated with shopfronts, advertisements and street signs all competing to broadcast their message to as wide an audience as possible. These have served as inspiration for many street photographers previously, and taking an architectural turn, have been mapped by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and their student Steven Izenour for their book, Learning From Las Vegas, which argued for a new way of designing cities. As we immerse ourselves more and more deeply within the virtual, possibly the image will become the city, as hinted at by the inclusion of Zaha Hadid’s design for Metrotopia in the Metaverse within the displayed works.