profiles. That identity is the city.
In the end it is the fieldwork and the documents that shape what I say. The theorizing here is driven by the desire to describe the world I encountered and recorded, and to account for my practice. The goal is to provide an archive that will be useful decades hence, in ways that I surely cannot fully anticipate.
Three provisos: First, I do not believe that any of the phenomena I discuss are specific to Los Angeles; that location is just where I have done most of my work. Second, “urban tomography” is meant to be a portmanteau term for the various practices that have relied on very large numbers of related images or documents to get at the world; everything I am doing has almost surely been done before by distinguished artists and social researchers, albeit under different auspices and sometimes less intensively.4 Third, while “tomography” is a technical term, you do not have to be an expert to read and appreciate multiple aspects, or slices, or tomograms. Tomography is the way we come to know the world ordinarily, every day.5
Most of the still photographs and the associated fieldwork date from 1999 to 2006: housing, commerce, and streets; then storefront houses of worship; then industrial streets; then inside industrial establishments; and then infrastructure. My work in video dates from about 2004, in aural surround-sound recording from about 2006, and in multiple video-smartphone urban tomography from 2007 and 2008.
We have established a website that will eventually have much of my Los Angeles archive, visual and aural, available digitally: http://tomography.usc.edu/urban, as well as links to other of our projects. Immediately, it will have some recordings and relevant images. It may be useful to have a list of the main topics in the archive (see also pp. xvi–xvii): houses, storefront houses of worship and worship services, infrastructure including helicopter aerials, industrial streets and neighborhoods, inside industrial sites and people at work, traffic commercial strips and ethnic markets and shopping, restaurants and eateries, industrial and commercial buildings of a large real estate firm, Department of Water and Power sites, streets and behind streets, urban botany, transit and bus life, the Pico-Robertson Jewish enclave, the ports, quiet places, sound sites, events, and marches.
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
