Framing the City
Visual Essay
Featured in JAWS
Volume 1 Number 2
ISSN: 20552823
Published by Intellect
Framing the City is a visual essay reflecting on the construction of images and the fabric of place. Combining 6 original collages and writing by Camilla Brueton with quotes from theorists and artists who influence her, it presents the city as a living collage. Hopes, dreams and optimism from different decades are embedded in the built environment; constantly framed and reframed by our movements and actions as we go about our daily lives.
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Scroll down to see an an extract.
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Extract from ‘Framing the City’
‘There is labour in making images ’ (Julien 2014)
An image: a framed view of the world.
How do we construct/ deconstruct images: on the page, on the screen, in the city around us?
Framed by a car window, a door, a passageway. Buildings collage against each other. Modernism against neo classicism, the architecture of neo capitalism adjacent to brutalism. Framing and reframing is ongoing and constant. The planning process- ideas / logistics underpin it all. Shifting values. Shifting power.
Powerlines cut across an apartment block, framed by a flyover.
Glimpses of a past and a future race past.
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‘Architecture is the form in which many cultural forces find expression and become therefore accessible to a mute, visual medium.’ (Stephen Shore 2014)
Tower blocks rise up.
Individual units stacked on top of each other.
Previously built as social housing, towards a better future for all (although in reality, often problematic).
Aspirational sky-scrapers are being built again across London, this time driven by market forces and capital gain.
A strange dodecagonal building squats in the foreground. Built maybe as a community centre, now an evangelical church. Hopes, aspirations and beliefs play out in the cityscape.
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Further references include Marc Auge, John Berger, Doreen Massey, Iain Sinclair, Saint Etienne… find out more here