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Chapter 1

Introduction

Tomography presents the world to us as a suite of slices, multiples that allow us to see a whole through its aspects, whether it be urban religiosity through images of many storefront churches (Figure 24) or urban infrastructure through images of a city’s electrical facilities and aerial photographs of utility corridors (Figures 17 and 19)—much as a computer-aided tomogram of the brain, ready for reading by the neurologist, shows her the brain slice by slice (see Figure 15). Or, cinematically, a composited movie consisting of fifteen submovies, each made one after the other, tiling a screen, exhibits some of what is going on in a busy section of a neighborhood (Figure 2), or a multipanel movie of the processes of manufacture in a foundry (Figure 6), each submovie made separately, is, again, much like the multipanel display prepared by a sonographer of the heart’s functioning (Figure 3)—from various angles, in various imaging modalities, ready for reading by the cardiologist. Originally many of the medical X-ray studies were done one image at a time, each image slice laboriously obtained by manipulations of the X-ray machine. However, now we as a matter of course produce suites of images or arrays of movies.

The pervasive themes here are everywhere at one time, every time at one place, causality seen not only in time but also in the spatial array of images: streetscapes, people in motion, multiples of a particular kind of activity, angiograms of links and nodes, and choreographies of work and worship. There is overlap, complexity, layering, and slices of life. The stories are cinematic in that they are time based and screen based, and may even employ the conventional devices of cuts, montage, and bricolage.¹ But they are not movies as we usually understand the term, where conventional narrative rules. Here the story may be about the nature of a particular process or institution. These tomograms, slices in space and in time and in typology, are sometimes displayed as videos or motion pictures, sometimes displayed as a high-multiplicity array, and sometimes both.

Figure 2. Multipanel view of street activity on East César E. Chávez Avenue near North Soto Street, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (Figure 1A and B, #3).

You bring curiosity and knowledge about urban processes, or of physiology, to these imaging modalities, whether as an expert or as a layperson. Surely, the images are pretty, but their value lies in what they allow you to imagine about what is going on given what you see in those images and what you know already. Of course, the echocardiographer edits the images and brief videos, choosing ones that will be most indicative for the physician, but it is the physician who watches these movies, bringing to bear narratives of cardiac function, structure, and pathology. The multiple movies and images are what the phenomenologist calls “aspectival variations,” allowing the viewer to imagine a whole, a notion of what is being displayed, a process or an institution that would produce these aspects. There is an overload of information but presumably just one idea.² Each image is indexed by the name of the aspect it displays, or its geographic/anatomical coordinates. The reader of these images can use this information to help find the images’ places in the prospective whole, employing imagination and perhaps with the aid of a display that organizes the aspectival images.

Figure 3. Echocardiogram, nine out of forty-five video views.

In doing urban tomography, I have deliberately photographed a very large number of houses of worship and industrial sites, as well as all of Los Angeles’s electrical stations. One must include so many images, so many aspects in a tomogram, for assurance that the corpus of images is comprehensive and representative and to allow for what might be called phenomenological knowledge in terms of multiple aspects.³ Moreover, the extent and diversity of the documentation allow you to take seriously displayed signs and symbols, the actual presence of these places and institutions in the city, their scriptural or technological or societal references.⁴ What might have been taken as idiosyncratic or without significance is now seen as ubiquitous and meaningful.

The reader might well ask, why these particular topics: churches, factories, streetscapes, aerials of utility corridors? The straightforward answer is that they follow from walking and driving the streets of my city, from discoveries made in the course of doing something else. Driving to work I eventually noticed how many storefront houses of worship there were along the way. When photographing such houses of worship, I discovered industrial Los Angeles across the street. When I walked down the industrial street photographing facades and streetscapes, I was invited in to look at the factory itself. When I asked if I might photograph other such sites, maybe one in three such inquiries was answered affirmatively. Taking the bus to work I discovered the richness of publicly hearable conversation; and, of course, cell phone half-conversations are ubiquitous. (One might ask, just what are people’s expectations of privacy?)

Eventually, I realized that I am never interested in one image or one site or one aural recording, one spectacular shot; rather, my interest is in many such sites and images. I realized that one-more is an unending temptation. And during an echocardiogram I realized that I have been doing much the same as does the sonographer, but now for a city’s phenomena.

As the chapters show, there is good reason to believe that each of these topics is rich and connected to how a city works. Work, infrastructure, and worship would seem to be fundamental components of a civilization. But what is most striking is how these topics are by the way encountered in the documentation work.

What We Might Know about a City

In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant took on the skeptical tradition that denies that we might have complete and total knowledge of the world, by making clear what we might mean by scientific knowledge. Such knowledge is a product of our faculties and their capacities, and, as important, the logic of our thoughtways. We cannot have knowledge of things in themselves, only as they are for us. There are limits to what we can know, limits to certainty and completeness. By staying within those bounds we can have scientific knowledge.

What can we know about a city and its sensorium? I am here concerned with aspects of the city that are available to sight and sound, although smell, taste, and touch often enhance those senses. It is through tomography that such knowledge is evidenced. Tomography is many slices or aspects or perspectives on the world, claiming that they are picturing the same thing, albeit from different angles. In effect, it is a claim that there is unity in multiplicity, identity in manifolds.⁵ Whether that tomogram is of the brain in a CAT scan or of the heart in an echocardiogram, or of the facades of storefront houses of worship in Los Angeles, what we are offered is a multiplicity of images or videos about the same thing, or so we initially believe. We employ those slices to articulate a more detailed understanding of that thing, whatever it is. We start out with a notion of that unity or identity or thing, and through that multiplicity we modify that notion so that it can more adequately provide for that variety in that multiplicity, so that the notion is more accommodating.⁶ We have some idea of what we are looking at already (the particular organ or thing or notion) as we examine each image separately; we are filling in the details, figuring out, an imaginative draftsmanship. Tomography allows for, it presumes, such identity in manifolds, many images showing us a world or an object as we encounter it from different aspects.

More generally, the project is to document a city in terms of multiple slices in space and in time and in type (hence tomography), a unity in that multiplicity of aspectival variations (a phenomenology), showing how people, machinery, and nature work together or coordinate to get the city’s work done (a choreography). Denis Diderot (circa 1760), Charles Marville (circa 1860), and Eugène Atget (circa 1915) once did much the same for Paris, in systematic surveys and multiples. Ordinary everyday life, in its tissue of negligible detail, is rich and deep, and through tomography we discover that detail in the context of an encompassing understanding of the whole.⁷

The cinematic arts and opera are suggestive models. The cinematic arts are concerned with multiple slices and cuts, compositing, storytelling, and screen language.⁸ In opera, the claim is that music, sound, and visual action form an indissoluble whole. In both cases there is also the claim that repeated viewings or performances are rewarding, your noticing and appreciating new things each time around as well as recalling what you have already taken in, perhaps radically revising your understanding of the work. Both also allow for multiple scenes on the same screen or proscenium, each playing against the other.⁹

Slicing Up a City

A tomograph is a knifelike device meant to section or cut thin slices of tissue. Computer-aided tomography uses thin, almost one-dimensional X-ray images, or “pencils,” of an object to construct a two-dimensional image of that slice of an object, and presumably those slices can then be fitted together to get a three-dimensional model.

We slice up a city or a type of phenomenon or a process through multiple aspects: photographs of the facades of many storefront churches allow us to appreciate urban religiosity as a diversely manifested phenomenon; photographs of the merchandise displays in ethnic markets show the variety and the similarities of urban subgroups; and photographs or videos of the various aspects of the casting operation in a foundry (Figure 6), forming an album, provide what we need to imagine the whole process.

Most urban situations are complex and varied and have many temporal aspects. To document a street market we need images from various perspectives but also of different sorts of transactions, of the insides of the booths, at various times of the day or week, and so forth. In addition it would help to interview the participants to discover their accounts of what is going on—in effect, additional slices or aspects.

We might capture such a situation or phenomenon one at a time, using still photography or audio recording. But now there are inexpensive sensors available and sufficiently ubiquitous to document urban life more pervasively, to provide a very large number of slices or aspects—unlike our experience in 1963 that resulted in just one movie of President Kennedy being assassinated. Namely, video-equipped cell phones are such sensors, and they are carried about all the time. We might imagine a swarm of such users (that is, crowd sourcing) documenting an event or situation, each from his or her own perspective or interest (Figure 5).¹⁰

Such a corpus of images, videos, and sound clips, less as a set of disjointed pieces of a puzzle and more as a series of differently detailed renditions with the documents labeled and organized by location and time and perspective, allow us to better know the whole that is here presented aspectivally.¹¹ Ideally, we have lived in this place or we have already done fieldwork ourselves, so we have some idea of what that urban world is like. We start out with a sense of what there is in a city and can fill in and modify our initial notions, check them out, and learn more. Urban tomography leads to a fuller sense of place and activity.

The actual city is an archive of repeated forms and structures and designs allowed to age, repair, and renew themselves. The ubiquity and variety of these forms in a city are products of the political economy of real estate development and decay, the rise and relative decline of neighborhoods under the influence of larger societal forces, and a politics of public choice for support and subsidy.

So the city itself is an archive of its past, much as a population is an archive of its past (as the evolutionary biologist would say). However built and for whatever reason, much of the built environment lasts well beyond its planned lifetime, perhaps rebuilt and repurposed. Speculative building of a large number of similar structures, whether they be stores or homes or industrial buildings or office buildings or factories, means that many structures have many identical representatives. In time each particular building is altered to suit its current or prospective owners; some buildings are destroyed, others restored. (The usual example is a planned urban development, as in a Levittown, fifty years after opening.) New uses make what once appeared to be doomed neighborhoods or building types into lively, productive, and economically viable places and enterprises. A real estate market that allows for these processes will eventually produce a city that has a wide variety of what were once similar buildings and uses, likely to be spread throughout the city although not in all areas. What was once repetitive and the same becomes variegated and diverse. Development alters the consequences of genetic endowments. Moreover, new uses tend to be agglomerated in certain areas, there being good reasons to have competing enterprises located near each other. Yet those enterprises also specialize, providing for a wide range of niches. So might the story of urban economies be told. The storefront houses of worship we see when we drive around town are products of just those processes that have built and rebuilt cities, especially since industrialization.

What an archive provides, what a built city provides, is a range of possibilities and instances, which then become inhabited in ways we do not foresee. The artist Frank Stella made a series of works (sculptures, paintings, prints), one or more for each chapter of Moby-Dick (which has 136 chapters).¹² Even knowing Moby-Dick well and Stella’s previous works, it would be difficult to predict how each chapter would be instantiated and the range of the instances. However, Moby-Dick provides Stella with the chance to make works that form a series, an archive, a meaningful whole, each work, however, on its own. So the city too provides for its inhabitants places and spaces to make their lives meaningful and whole.

Choreographies of Repetition

So we might have an account of industrialization, but now that of the Second Industrial Revolution and the great migrations that have continually populated the City of Los Angeles: the interrelated choreographies of where and how people worshipped and worked, and the engineering—industrial, civil, chemical, and electrical—and the coordinated networks and systems and infrastructures that supported industry and residents and that allowed them to live close by each other.

The Second Industrial Revolution made possible photography, radiology, and the images we can make, and the images reflect possibilities built into the technologies of cameras, lenses, films, and X-ray machines, now an ongoing transformation from the analog film to the digital sensor domains, from colloid chemistry to digital electronics. What was once a black art of emulsion manufacture is now another black art, the design of algorithms for processing sensor data or pixel information in the digital file. Much the same has taken place in the world of aural recording and reproduction, albeit microphones (and lenses too) are not digital devices.

The studies I discuss here are, in effect, a repetition of a past history, now in Los Angeles rather than Paris. As for Paris, I am thinking of Denis Diderot’s (1713–84) description and engravings (Figure 7) of workers in the arts et métiers for the L’Encyclopédie (1751–60ff), Charles Marville’s (1816–79) photographs (1858–77) of the streetscapes of Paris before and then after Haussmann eviscerated them under Napoleon III’s direction (Figure 4), and Eugène Atget’s (1857–1927) systematic photographing of Paris’s streets, stores, monuments, residential interiors, parks, and workers in the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps a consequence of Cartesian philosophy that truth is systematic, the models here are French. There is the impulse to image and catalog and to archive, to be descriptive and encyclopedic, to take city life seriously and systematically—and to be aspectival and empirical. D’Alembert in the preface (1751) to d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s L’Encyclopédie tells us they had to go to the workers themselves to draw out from those workers the details of processes of manufacture and craft, and the encyclopedists needed figures or pictures to articulate and convey that information.¹³

We know a little about how Marville and Atget went about doing their work. They were systematic, especially Marville, following a plan provided by their employers or commissioners. Marville was likely given a list of streets that would be pierced/eviscerated and later a list of streets now reconstructed. Atget may have been commissioned to update Marville’s survey.¹⁴

Marville might have gone down a street and then up the same street, making several down- (or up-) the-street images along the way. Streets were often adjacent or intersecting, and so there were overlaps and multiple views of the same places. Atget progressed through the space in a more panoramic way, with multiple angles and overlapping viewpoints, and from the overall to the detailed.¹⁵ In effect, they were doing urban tomography, avant la lettre, providing a rich set of aspectival variations, allowing one to imagine what the street or place was like so that it could accommodate these suites of images.

City life is produced by material and ordinary circumstances. So if newspapers are to be sold, there will be vendors or vending boxes at certain corners; if there is to be worship, there must be places available for that worship. What is everyday and ordinary is as indicative and richly symbolic as is the extraordinary and unique. This is the stuff that we take as given, as natural, as background for what else we are doing. Often it is visible, and sometimes it is audible.

An urban tomography may document systems, for what is apparently idiosyncratic is in fact deeply embedded: many storefront churches, all the electricity-distributing stations, or the various firms in an industrial or manufacturing sector. (The various objects might not be intended as a system, but they function as such, for example, producing for each other as well as for end consumers.) We present the world back to ourselves, in its ubiquity and variety, so it is recognizable—even if not in the manner we ordinarily see or hear or even ignore these places and objects. Each document presents us with an aspect of the whole; we make that image or sound recording because we believe from past experience and theory it will so contribute. Yet once we understand what is going on, any particular single document does much of the work of encapsulating what we know. The very detailed and particular example or image, itself, can now make a larger statement.

There is a drama and a choreography in everyday life that give it meaningfulness, an overarching organization of plot, role, and movement: what we are up to, at various levels of detail, and how we work together. The everyday is significant; the ordinary and unnoticed has its own drama—a drama that is taken as unremarkable, until it might fall apart in pathology and dysfunction. So an analytic description of the drama and the choreography of an industry shows the materials and initial processes, the way people work together and the ways they manage mistakes, the major products, the tools and machines, the workmanship of the craftspersons, and the terminology as it is embodied in practice, much as Diderot would have prescribed. And these aspects are shown to be aspects of, aspects of a meaningful activity, say, making something, or aspects of an object or an institution.

Any story is present in several media modalities. The modalities inform each other, so that when you record in the best of surround sound, in listening to the recording you will imagine a visual image of the place and of what you are hearing. Cardiologists place themselves within the beating heart, not as novelists but as informed sensors of the heart’s functioning.

What you encounter again and again is the world in its variety, repetition, and ubiquity, where there is always more, and just when you thought there was a plethora, there is more again. In effect, we are looking at threads of the urban fabric, each thread linked to the others, so that what we see in detail up close is seen as being located within a larger context.

No generalization will erase the facticity of each image, its unavoidable particularity. The this-ness of the world exceeds its genericity.¹⁶ Tomography allows for both. If details and particulars are instances of generic notions, there are other unavoidable details and particulars that are not under the command of the generic. Hence the world is recognizable to us in its particularity, no matter how powerful are our categories and genera. This is my echocardiogram, not that of an abstract body.

In cataloging a phenomenon, the aesthetic and the compositional are in tension with the practical and the depictive. But the actual image must be all of these. So, for example, photographers for the Library of Congress’s Historic American Building Survey and Historic American Engineering Record insist that a well-composed and properly lit photograph will also be more informative and depictively effective than one lacking those qualities. The aesthetic and the practical would appear to be very much of a piece.¹⁷ The catalog and the multiple video echocardiogram are ways we insist on unity in multiplicity, that it is through aspectival variations that we know about the world and its potentials.

Rephotography as Repetition

Public health crises, war, political transformation, and natural disaster have often been occasions for the reconstruction of cities. But as insidious is the influence of economy and technology, creating new opportunities and obsolescences. Still, what is most remarkable is the persistence of the built environment (unless it is deliberately destroyed). When Charles Marville was asked (1858, 1865, 1877) to photograph the streets of Paris, it was presumably to show the before and the after: the positive transformation, the hygienic and aesthetic improvements. Marville was the official photographer of The City of Paris, and was a formal part of Haussmann’s enterprise, commissioned by the Service des Travaux Historiques. Marville’s charge was to preserve the memory of the past, rather than to regret the decision to clear away the underbrush that had grown in Paris and that made it an unhealthy place.¹⁸ Marville left a systematic suite of images of monuments, green spaces, urban furnishings (public urinals, streetlamps, fountains), and of the streets themselves, which we now might employ to imagine a way of life that has disappeared. Still, what is remarkable is how much of that earlier urban fabric remains today.

Now rephotographing past scenes is standard practice for those concerned with documenting changes in the landscape and natural resources, and this depends on there being an archive of earlier photographs. Art photographers have adapted this practice for their own purposes: Mark Klett (nineteenth-century photographers of the western United States); Douglas Levere (Berenice Abbott); Christopher Rauschenberg (Atget); and Ed Ruscha (earlier Ruscha). Jeff Wall and Eleanor Antin photograph restaged events, imagined or adapted, sometimes portrayed in earlier visual works.

Rephotography is often done with rigorous demands on being at the right viewpoint to duplicate the original photograph’s perspective, the right time of day and time of year to duplicate the shadows, and an appropriate focal-length lens to duplicate the extent of the earlier image. In summer 2008 I asked several colleagues who happened to be in Paris to rephotograph some of Marville’s images. I gave my colleagues maps and copies of the original images. They had the task of finding the right points of view, and I encouraged just a reasonably good approximation.¹⁹

Figure 4. Screen shot from http://www.usc.edu/sppd/parismarville. Photographs of rue de Tilsitt (near Place d’Étoile) by Charles Marville, 1877, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris; and by Fritz Koenig/Tom Holman, 2008, used by permission. Website by Kazuma Kazeyama. Map © 2010 Google; Imagery © 2010 Digital Globe.

The scene I have chosen (Figure 4) shows how enduring is much of this urban fabric, in part because Marville’s is an after-reconstruction photograph (~1877), and so perhaps the buildings and streets might well persist for 130 years. But even in Marville’s before-reconstruction photographs (1865–68), quite often there are features or buildings, sometimes in the background, that are seen in the 2008 rephotographs.

There is lots of room for further work in this vein. In the last few years various private firms have systematically photographed the streets of major cities, and made those images available on the Internet. Google. com’s Street View, with its twelve-camera van; pagesjaunes.fr in France, with its squad of photographers going up and down the streets; and bing.com’s oblique aerial views (provided by Pictometry) are perhaps the most well known (as of early 2010). So if you have an archive of old photographs (say, from a newspaper morgue or a utility company’s files), you may do armchair rephotography—although it is likely that the perspectives provided by the private firms will only roughly approximate those of your earlier images. On the other hand, a slightly different point of view reveals important facts, since it is easy for occlusions to occur. We are in a three-dimensional world, and our images are from particular vantage points at particular times.

Swarming as Tomography

Imagine sending out a swarm of people or a troop of scouts into a market or crowd, or imagine a crew of celebrity watchers outside a Beverly Hills restaurant, each person equipped with a video cell phone. The resulting number of videos would be large. Rather than edit or try to conform them to each other (as in a montaged panorama), we might display them all together on one screen in a tiling, with locations and times indicated by maps and clocks. If we are fortunate, we have various scales portrayed, from overviews, inside and out, and at various angles, to many different detailed individual interactions.

We are informed and curious inquirers, and so we bring along notions about what goes on in cities and what we might look out for. By means of these slices in space and in time, we might have the sense that we are looking everywhere at all times. Still, there are likely to be lacunae. Realtime monitoring of the inflow of videos might allow the viewer to send commands to the swarm or troop to focus in on certain places, to get more detail about a particular activity, or to spread themselves out.²⁰

We might infer which point in space and time is being examined at each moment in a video. We link (in our database) multiple views of the same space and time region. The places we are looking at are quite varied in their structure, with occlusions, multiple layers, and multiple foci of interest. Ahead of time we know little in detail about a place’s organization, which itself changes in real time, but we do have general expectations from past experience. However, that organization is not at all fiducial: for everyday life, you cannot just say something such as, let me look at the left ventricle of the heart from below, or part of the Earth’s surface at latitude-longitude Y–Z, at time X, under a particular range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The everyday world is rarely so fixed and specified.

Even so, you already have some idea of the organization of the place or process, perhaps even a wrong idea, and in the process of examining the various vignettes you are filling in that schematic organization or perhaps questioning its capacity to accommodate this or that vignette. You do not figure out the structure from the vignettes; you fill in a presumption, if that presumption is sufficiently accommodating. (If “figuring” is given the literal interpretation, in terms of drawing a figure, then perhaps you are figuring out—that act of imaginative draftsmanship.)

Figure 5. Multipanel display of videos produced by three cell phones at Santee Alley bazaar in downtown Los Angeles (Figure 1A and B, #20). tomography.usc.edu.

Consider a simpler situation, taking many video clips of a well-defined site with just one camera: a video album. Sometimes the world as such is available to us as a patterned, organized whole, as when we enter a small foundry and just look around, perhaps sketching a plan of what we see. Still, we might find the scene overwhelming in its detailed activity. The aspectival variations provided by a video album, viewed again and again, help make sense of the place; yet in our having looked around, we already have a sense of the whole place, albeit perhaps not yet a sense of how foundry work is done, the processes and the flows of materials. So we might spatially organize the vignettes rather more precisely than is provided by geographical positioning (GPS) information, following our plan sketch. Still, the various processes and how they interact may remain rather more opaque. We might infer what is going on by looking at the flows of materials from one vignette to another, arranging them in process order rather than spatial order (although the design of a workshop, or of a factory, should make the two reasonably congruent). Moreover we already know lots about materials, that heat makes things flow and cooling stops that flow, and so we bring physical science to our viewing of the vignettes. To make sense, the place must be organized spatially and processually and in accord with the physics and chemistry of materials. And, of course, as did Diderot, we might ask the people who work there what is going on.

Figure 6A. Mold making, casting, and polishing in sand casting of metal: foundry, downtown Los Angeles (Figure 1A and B, #4).

Or perhaps we visit a vast and sprawling high-end forge, with monstrous presses, ovens, and sophisticated milling machines. While the individual images or videos give us a sense of each of the activities, still we need a layout diagram of the forge to locate them in the space and time of this industrial complex. We cannot see all of it from a single position. It would help to take notes on what we are told by the foremen and to be able to ask them questions on a return visit. In addition, as with the foundry, knowing about the physics of metals would have made sure that our story made technological and scientific sense.²¹ In each case we might want to know about how people work together in dangerous but mostly predictable work environments—presumably in well-choreographed groups.

Figure 6B. Overview of foundry floor: ingots at far right (the oven is nearby but not in the picture), ejected sand from castings at far left, and men preparing, pouring, and cleaning castings in the middle ground.

Once the place makes better sense, the video clips are now seen as aspects of that place, that foundry, that industrial process and its machinery and its workers. Yet it is those video clips and our sketch plan and our interviews that enabled us to articulate more adequately this place’s sense and meaning.

A place might be a neighborhood street rather than a formal site. Having made multiple videos of an ethnic neighborhood’s main street, such as East César E. Chávez Avenue in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (Figure 2; Figure 1B, #3), we discover who is on the street at 11:30 A.M. on a weekday in Boyle Heights—elderly adults and mothers and children, or people who are not at work or school—complementary to what is seen at our work sites. The aspects or video clips are aspects of work and family life in an ethnic working-class neighborhood. Much of this is obvious once seen, but perhaps less so ahead of time and likely less obvious fifty years from now.

Figure 7. Engraving showing the making of plate glass, from the L’Encyclopédie (~1760).

The World Is Consistent

I have been focusing on the visual and spatial aspects of phenomena, but the aural and temporal ones are as significant. If we have multiple video vignettes taken by multiple cameras, the soundscape is likely to be shared even more than is the landscape. Sound is everywhere, sneaking up from behind, diffracting around corners. Images of different nearby places may well share sound content, albeit the sound is likely to have a different quality depending on where we are looking and listening. Yet we believe there is just one world, one identity that provides those multiple profiles. So the sound in different vignettes must accord with each other and with what we see. That is our working presupposition.

More generally, video tomography makes us rather more acutely aware of the phenomenology of perception and understanding, since it provides for greater complexities in those acts of finding identities and filling in their detail than are demanded by multiple still photographs or even multiple sound recordings of a place or type or process. What is remarkable is that often we are able to figure out what is going on through such documentation and get a fulfilling sense of the richness of the city. It is not that greater detail solves the problems of documentation; rather, it demonstrates further our ability to figure out the world, fulfilling its possibilities: an imaginative cinematography.

Tomography, with its multiple images and aspectival variations, is the archetype of what the phenomenological philosopher teaches us about unity in multiplicity (again, “identity in a manifold presentation of profiles”). We start out, always, with some sense of what we are seeing—in space, in time, and in type. The multiplicity of aspects allows us to fill in that notion, satisfying or disappointing our expectations.

Seeing Wide-Angle Deeply

The cameras and wide-angle lenses I use for still photography, having 70–85 degree horizontal angles of view, allow me to be at a distance a bit less than the height or width of a storefront’s facade.²² That is, I am still on the sidewalk or just in the street, and yet I can incorporate into my photograph the almost-square facade of a single store’s width and height, including the sign above the front window. Everything is in the frame. My viewfinder has a bubble level in it or an alignment grid, so I can be sure that I am not tilting the camera up or down, or to the left or the right—so squares remain square in the image.

Nor am I distant from people at work on the shop floor or at a worship service, for I am quite close to the first rank of these people in front of my camera. Often in these situations I have carefully pushed my wideangle snout into their work space or worship space, using an unobtrusive camera, no flash or tripod, and moving quickly but respectfully.

Moreover, I am close enough so that little is in the way that might occlude the facade or the work site—although a large piece of machinery, or a tree, or a parked car or truck may be unavoidable. (The sun may be coming up over the roof of the building, or the indoor lighting might be aimed at my lens, and then I must photograph obliquely, rather than frontally, to avoid lens flare.)

For an individual facade, not much of the surrounding environment is in view—except for the sidewalk, the cars, the street furniture, and the walls of adjacent buildings. The facade is just there, in front of me—a particular facticity. Yet if I photograph facades, going down a street one building after the next, each image overlapping the adjacent one, say on a strip of 35 mm film, each facade is now seen in context.²³

For indoor landscapes of industrial sites, even though I am close in, the depth of the scene incorporated by the wide-angle lens brings tantalizing detail into view.²⁴ The image has enormous reserves of quality and detail—the lenses are that good.²⁵

What is striking is how much is left in within the image, what is carved in by the frame lines of the negative or the sensor, including things in the background. You are forced to be right there rather than distant. Moreover, whatever occludes your ostensible subject, that in-front-of stuff, such as a parked car, is significant in itself—and may someday be what you are really interested in, much as you might be interested in what is in the background, what is not focused on. Getting closer, some of the once-occluding objects are behind you.

To have a large angle of view means that you see much more of the objects you are photographing. More of an object’s shape and the range of its shading will be part of the image. The tonality will be more varied. The continuity of surfaces and the presences of edges and bends and cracks (the shapes of things) are more fully given, so that surfaces, edges, and bends are not merely local facts but are global geometric and tonal facts: the shapes of things, what they look like when seen.

For the most part, these sites were not meant to be photographed, although they are readily accessible. These are sites meant to be lived in, worked in, worshipped in, in the matter of course seen but not imaged. I am not a photographer but just an “old man with a camera,” as I was once described by a metalworker at a factory. Or, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir put it, “My aim was to give the impression that I was carrying a camera and microphone in my pocket and recording whatever came my way, regardless of its comparative importance.”²⁶ I am interested in the world, not the photograph, not “the shot,” not the archive of photographs as artworks. The photographs make it possible to see what is there in front of your eyes, now unavoidably so.²⁷

The material was there for anyone to see, but it required fieldwork to find enough of it so that it could be taken to be a phenomenon, systematic work so that what I saw was not taken to be idiosyncratic, and reflection to place what I discovered in a larger scholarly context. So discoveries become objective phenomena.

To do this sort of fieldwork one must have extensive examples of the phenomenon of concern. Once you can provide those examples to others, they might well be convinced of the reality of the phenomenon and then be quite comfortable with just a few examples. But fifty or five hundred examples are the most effective inoculation against skeptics.²⁸ It helps to be able to provide rich overlapping theoretical insights from various disciplines, so that what is perhaps peculiar or unnoticed is now seen as indicative of a much larger range of facts and situations. In addition you must show that what you have found is not just a chance occurrence—numbers help, but maps of spatial distributions and other such will also help. Finally, you will need good taste or good fortune in your discoveries, for some ubiquitous phenomena may not be as illuminating as are others.

In order to make such discoveries, your fieldwork has to be relatively unencumbered by looking for something else. You have to put in the time and effort, and you will almost surely do most of your work on foot (or, as in some of my work, from a helicopter) or be present to actual working people (in a hospital or in a factory).

You have to be able to tell a story about what you have found that is rich in its connections with what everyone would seem to know. You will have succeeded if people start noticing the phenomenon you have identified and think it is obvious—when, before they saw your work, they saw nothing of interest. In the natural sciences, such discoveries have always been of very great import. In the social sciences, we sometimes forget the importance of phenomena, subjugating them to theory and theory testing. Our sensory world cries for identifiable phenomena. The phenomena or processes or objects or places become identities that are seen to provide for that manifold presentation of profiles or aspects. In Chapters 2 through 5 I try to exemplify wide-angle and deep documentation, showing how the world produces what we see.

Lee Friedlander’s City

Whether through images of monuments in the middle of cities or images of parking lots on parcels eventually to be developed, the photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) has shown us how our cities are ironic and planned and layered and juxtaposed and discordant. A typical Friedlander photograph will show a chain-link fence up front, a high-rise office tower in the distant background, both in sharp focus—in between those two a concrete block wall separating two parking lots, and in the near foreground Friedlander’s shadow.²⁹

Friedlander’s point of view is rarely plan, axonometric, or frontal. Rather, for example, he wonders, what does the world look like to a baby in a carriage, while the baby is on her back? He finds those most available of places to stand, the parking lots and the backyards and the sidewalks, and then photographs what is in front of him, layered by all the stuff in between. Again, there is enough depth of field for all to be in focus. The wide-angle lens of his camera is superb to the edges, so everything has more than enough definition.

A city is a juxtaposition, a clash, a discomposition, since no one controls everything and the possibilities for development are extensively and inordinately explored, much as grasses and mosses grow in every concrete crack. While much of the city is constructed to be seen (although not the parts I have focused on), with those wonderful architectural photographs or engravings representing that goal, in fact we see it from inconvenient places as we go about our business, but then we edit out the inconveniences in our memory. Camera and film are less readily blind in that way. Friedlander’s camera and film capture the way things are, not necessarily but casually, opportunistically. The layers and planes are not so well aligned as we might hope, they clash with each other, and what is backstage is often in front of what is supposedly the main show.

A friend who knows Friedlander tells me, “Lee would never own up to being a critical/serious observer of the dynamics, etc., that determine the nature of what a city looks like, is. He’d just mutter something about just wanting to make a picture out of the elements at hand.” Craftsmen work this way. (If I recall correctly, Friedlander once said something like, “I’m just a worker with a tool in his hands,” referring to his camera.) Craftsmen know what they are doing, and it sort of all adds up, but that takes time and revision and learning to see the work as a whole, perhaps with lots of extra parts.

Chain-link fencing, plate-glass windows, riotous overlappings of plants or objects or people or cables and pipelines, and detritus such as broken concrete barriers are recurrent elements in Friedlander’s photographs—as they are in actual cities. Empty plazas, isolated buildings, and manifestly fake siding are ubiquitous. Everything that is possible is instantiated; all is in a larger context that displaces it from its more immediate situation; juxtapositions remind us that not everything obstructs everything; and almost everything peeks through and montages. The coincidences are there for the taking, the overlaps ever present but filtered in our memories by our being up to orderly and meaningful lives.

Industrial life and work and plants and shrubbery are some of Friedlander’s other recurrent themes. In each case whatever we take as formal photography of buildings or plants or places is displaced by a larger, more encompassing vision that is rather more disturbing even if it is just as accurate and just as seen. People at work are not merely at work, but they are fixed in place, almost trapped by his electronic flash. They are part of the machinery or bureaucracy, and yet they are not mechanical, not functional.

I suspect that Friedlander would say he is taking pictures of just what is there. By its repetition of themes, by its variety of perspectives and slices of city life, Friedlander’s work as a whole is urban tomography made into art.