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.
Chapter 2
Cities, Streetscapes, and the Second Industrial Revolution
The next five chapters tell the stories, historical and economic and sociological, I have learned from doing the fieldwork and making visual, aural, and video documentation. I discuss how the images display those stories, and so how urban tomography investigates and reveals city life. Urban tomography allows one to imagine more adequate identities in that manifold presentation of profiles. In the fieldwork, you discover properly commodious identities, ones that better accommodate the various aspects. The stories I am telling are just those identities, stories that accommodate the documents I have made. It will be useful to begin with some fieldwork reports.
Union Central Cold Storage, Inc. (Figure 1A and B, #11), has an icehouse that was opened in 1908 and an adjacent cold-storage warehouse that dates from the 1950s, with more recent add-ons. It sits on three acres of land on Industrial Street on the east side of downtown Los Angeles, right off South Alameda Street. The land has become so valuable that the owner might sell it, move his plant to an industrial city several miles south, and refit a warehouse there so that it becomes a modern cold-storage plant—replacing an accumulation of added-on pieces of building and equipment at his old site. And, at least initially, the new owner might just demolish the Industrial Street buildings, pave the site, and use it as a parking lot.
SAC Industries on Avalon Boulevard at East 62nd Street (Figure 1A and B, #1; Figure 1C, “d”) has slowly but surely absorbed more and more buildings going east on East 62nd as the firm has expanded. What was once their focus, on end-of-runs in metal manufacturing and less than perfect metal stock, now also includes a very substantial used-clothing sorting and resale enterprise. In each case the proprietor’s skill is being able to buy vast quantities of less than perfect goods, sort them into bundles of goods that have shared qualities, and then find markets for those bundles.
SAC is located within
