An Open Manifesto:

The experience of living in a city is constantly bound by the banalities of life. We are living in a culturally mixed world where we are socially inept to relent in selecting differences or rejecting alienation. Walter Benjamin writes, “This is never a one way street, but a dialectical process in which urban actors interact with their environment, struggle among themselves for control of it, promote and represent and denigrate and destroy it.” Everything we know will change in its unassailable discourse as we confront boundaries that challenge us in our everyday lives. The ephemeral essence of the photographs is not to pique curiosity of a bystander or conjure wanderlust of the flâneur, nonetheless to evoke ‘an urban analogue’ of society seen by the eyes of the photographer. Michel de Certeau argues, “The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it… Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outling itself against the visible.” (Certeau, 1984, Walking in the city)

Methods of street photography oscillate into an emotive entity that somehow speaks to us specific truths about today’s contemporary civilization and its social body. Hegel (1805) suggests about the  “Spirit is the “nature” of individuals, their immediate substance, and its movement and necessity; it is as much the personal consciousness in their existence as it is their pure consciousness, their life, their actuality.” This absence of the ‘real’ could actively be integrated into statements that are categorized with the realistic and factual - as we morph everyday living spaces as part of this new sensibility of the city.

In this showcase of photographic works presented by Goldsmiths Sociology Department and the current students from MA in Photography & Urban Cultures, we challenge many aspects of what has been historically important to every society – the question of an urban identities orbiting around the adaptability of new forms and homogenous cultures – in attempts to contextualize what is distinctively humane about city life and ask vital new questions as to what constitutes ‘The Public Image’ in the twenty-first century.

Written by Ho Leng

Selection Team: Paul Halliday, Ioannis N. Eleftherakos, Ho Leng

Curated & designed by Ho Leng.