Photography as visual Urbanism
3rd Candide Conference
31.01.2019-01.02.2019
In recent years, visual urbanism has emerged as a new research field. Being aware of
the photography’s potentials and constraints in practice (such as photographic objectification)
and being critical of street photography, researchers using critical visual methodologies
in anthropology (Banks 2001; Pink 2007), cultural studies (Lister and Wells,
2000), sociology (Holliday 2001), and cultural geography (Rose 2012) have underlined
the importance of reflexivity and questioned the uncritical use of both cameras and
images. Yet, until now, a discussion of incorporating visual research methods into the
knowledge of architectural design and urban planning has been very minimal. While
researchers in other disciplines have already suggested possibilities for new visual
methodologies, researchers in architecture and urban planning have not undertaken
similar approaches in their disciplines yet.
In this conference, we aim to generate a new cross-disciplinary dialogue between
theoreticians and practitioners of urbanism and photography in order to develop new
collaborative methods for research on the visual, sensory and performative dimensions
of urbanism through photography. Our aim is to reveal, that the practice of architecture
and urbanism departs from a hybrid state in which memory, research and mediation are
bound together in a specific operative mode. Photography, as a means of visual and
performative urban practice, can be connected to the acts of remembering, of investigating
or of planning. The main research questions to discuss during the conference
are: What can architects, urban planners and designers learn from photographers ad
visual artists and vice versa? How might research methodologies of photographers and
visual artists help us challenge existing research methodologies in urbanism and urban
studies? How can we define a new common ground between making photography and
the practices of designing / making / living urban spaces?
The conference program is available for download here. / The conference program is available for download here.
We kindly ask you to send your binding registration to mangartz@theorie.arch.rwth-aachen.de by 21.01.2019. / Please send your registrations to mangartz@theorie.arch.rwth-aachen.de until the 21st of January 2019.