Paper short abstract:

This visual essay is an attempt to disclose aspects of the city and city life through a combination of texts and black and white pictures of unstaged aspects of urban material culture and human behavior. The - mostly panoramic - pictures were made in numerous cities around the globe.

Paper long abstract:

This visual essay is an attempt to disclose aspects of the city and city life through a combination of texts and black and white pictures of unstaged aspects of urban material culture and human behavior. The introductory text describes and evokes the city as a hybrid semiotic place which can be literally looked at from different angles that often refer to different orders of signification: the use of space, the types, means and degree of control, mobility, fashion, cultural diversity, entertainment, tourism, commerce, personal, interpersonal and group behaviour, the public and the private sphere. Much of this materializes in numerous artefacts and behaviours. These multiple intermeshing discourses - the historic, the political, the social, the multicultural, the commercial, the religious etc. - provide the city with its unpredictable, multi-layered, never fully graspable, character. The text contains multiple hints to visual aspects of experiencing the city and as such it helps to read the photographs in a certain way. In turn the photographs provide a concrete context to the introductory text, as well as opportunities to move beyond it. The - mostly panoramic - pictures were made in numerous cities around the globe: New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Beijing, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, Manchester, Phoenix, Berlin, Montreal, Copenhagen, Las Vegas, Dublin, Barcelona, Milwaukee, Lisbon, Shanghai, Milan, San Francisco, Rome, Athens etc.

For a sample of my previous photographic work on urban culture see http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v1/a17/