1 00:00:00,540 --> 00:00:05,100 Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the program. 2 00:00:05,240 --> 00:00:08,250 Wonderful seminar series. 3 00:00:08,250 --> 00:00:15,480 And it is with great pleasure that I can introduce you to our main speaker today. 4 00:00:16,990 --> 00:00:24,020 In Alaska, we'll be talking about vectors of looking and reflections on the lives of others. 5 00:00:24,060 --> 00:00:28,590 Very. Your survey of Warsaw 19, 1944. 6 00:00:30,150 --> 00:00:38,490 Let me ask my senior lecturer in culture and Visual Studies of the University of Edinburgh School of Architecture. 7 00:00:39,210 --> 00:00:50,010 Her research centres on the material manifestations of language and the relationship between sitting and visuality, memory and representation. 8 00:00:50,910 --> 00:01:01,560 And I was the curator and designer of Cold War Neons and Socialist Modernity Exhibition at the Lighthouse in Glasgow in 2009. 9 00:01:02,310 --> 00:01:14,820 Her publications on Socialist City include the special issue of the Journal of Architecture and with the article Warsaw Tracking Tracking the City, 10 00:01:15,360 --> 00:01:19,170 which was co-edited with Mark Dorian in 2010. 11 00:01:20,010 --> 00:01:30,120 Her recent work focuses on forms of writing with the image and includes exactly vectors of looking and reflections on the love of history. 12 00:01:30,120 --> 00:01:42,030 A survey of Warsaw, 1944, in the volume under the title seeing from both the aerial view in Visual Culture, 13 00:01:42,330 --> 00:01:49,770 edited by Mark Dorian and Frederick Purcell, which came out in London in 2013. 14 00:01:50,580 --> 00:01:59,460 There is also another text writing with the photograph, a spaceman description and an architectural text in action, 15 00:01:59,850 --> 00:02:09,000 which was published in and represented a representative of social machines, photography and the production of space. 16 00:02:09,690 --> 00:02:20,940 Published in Arcus University Press in 2013 and now is currently completing a book project on urban memory and visuality. 17 00:02:21,600 --> 00:02:25,560 More so. Surfaces, positions, objects. 18 00:02:25,830 --> 00:02:30,490 Shadows. So it's to you. Thank you very much, Michael. 19 00:02:30,610 --> 00:02:40,650 And I'm delighted to be here. I'll be reading the paper and I'll try to be a rather brisk with a reading of it. 20 00:02:41,490 --> 00:02:46,050 I want to read it as a as a as one entity, as one text. 21 00:02:46,620 --> 00:02:49,650 So I will not be diverting from it. 22 00:02:49,920 --> 00:02:57,389 But I wanted to briefly afterwards perhaps discuss what happens when a paper is 23 00:02:57,390 --> 00:03:04,560 repositioned in different adjacencies with the different texts and and when it travels. 24 00:03:04,560 --> 00:03:09,780 And so I want to look at it in, in slightly different way. 25 00:03:09,780 --> 00:03:16,979 And maybe we could have a chance to talk about the book project and what happens when that text travels. 26 00:03:16,980 --> 00:03:27,270 And so I quickly will will focus on the site. 27 00:03:32,430 --> 00:03:40,889 Vectors of looking at memory is not an instrument for the exploration of the past, but rather its theatre memories. 28 00:03:40,890 --> 00:03:47,940 The medium of what has been experienced as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried in debris. 29 00:03:48,480 --> 00:03:54,960 Fact of the matter, only deposits layers which deliver only to the most meticulous examination. 30 00:03:55,200 --> 00:03:59,430 What constitutes the true assets hidden within the inner earth? 31 00:03:59,850 --> 00:04:06,479 The images which tone from all former contexts stand like ruins or torsos in the 32 00:04:06,480 --> 00:04:12,180 collector's gallery as the treasures in the prosaic chambers of our belated insights. 33 00:04:16,230 --> 00:04:23,940 And also address 36 Smallness Street, an artist's studio archive hidden in an annexe of a century old tenement. 34 00:04:24,510 --> 00:04:35,370 The building bombed in the last week, last weeks of 1944 is one of the final acts of the herbicide remains the memory of its past trauma. 35 00:04:35,850 --> 00:04:40,320 Its front sheared and its back annexed reduced to a single story. 36 00:04:41,100 --> 00:04:46,830 The studio built into the ruin after the war, supports the disfigured structure from within, 37 00:04:47,520 --> 00:04:51,810 offering a sense of architectonic coherence that is not visible in the exterior, 38 00:04:52,410 --> 00:05:01,050 a solidity of a place set against the material vulnerability of the site outside the trajectory of a falling bomb 39 00:05:01,830 --> 00:05:10,470 registered in a hideous scar on the party wall and in the futility of a staircase that once led to no absent floors, 40 00:05:10,920 --> 00:05:14,220 outlines an architectural section of destruction. 41 00:05:15,150 --> 00:05:19,020 The extent of the damage, however, the sense of the larger trauma, 42 00:05:19,470 --> 00:05:25,410 the tragic topography of the mutilated urban surface can only be seen in a plan view. 43 00:05:26,160 --> 00:05:33,900 The consequences of the aerial attacks six decades prior of a targeting view from above remain scored in the landscape. 44 00:05:35,820 --> 00:05:43,080 Stored in a desk drawer in the studio is a collection of century old glass negatives featuring portraits of Warsaw landmarks. 45 00:05:43,920 --> 00:05:45,870 One of the negatives is damaged. 46 00:05:46,080 --> 00:05:54,690 Its glass sheet shattered into seven shards that originate from a small point of impact, a sharp sudden blow that gouge the centre, 47 00:05:55,080 --> 00:06:01,350 radiating fractures across the brittle plate pieced together assembled on a flat surface, 48 00:06:01,710 --> 00:06:09,060 the glass fragments form a disquieting image object, archiving the photograph within its splintered body. 49 00:06:09,270 --> 00:06:14,760 The negative cannot be held up to the light only when supported by a horizontal plane. 50 00:06:15,210 --> 00:06:20,430 Only when viewed from above can this broken object be regarded as complete. 51 00:06:20,910 --> 00:06:22,560 The potentiality of an image. 52 00:06:23,820 --> 00:06:30,870 I pick up a sharp glass segment from the table, holding it above the stone floor of the studio and feel a sudden vertigo. 53 00:06:31,470 --> 00:06:39,630 A realisation of vertical distance, a vulnerability to impact that this fragment materialises along with the vector of my gaze. 54 00:06:41,700 --> 00:06:49,380 A print made from the fracture to negative renders the image whole not whole again, but whole anew. 55 00:06:50,040 --> 00:06:59,790 Neither the composition or serenity of the pictured scene is disturbed as the puncture coincides with the water surface along the horizontal axis. 56 00:07:00,090 --> 00:07:02,370 The symmetry of the view is retained. 57 00:07:03,300 --> 00:07:11,280 Gentle ripples only underscore the disjuncture between the forces affecting the surface of the glass and those impacting the scene. 58 00:07:12,510 --> 00:07:18,389 The image can no longer be what it would have been before the negatives damage the residue of the past. 59 00:07:18,390 --> 00:07:25,080 Trauma is now sealed in the photograph located in the plane of material absence where the missing piece, 60 00:07:25,650 --> 00:07:32,130 the place of material absence where the missing piece joins long cracks and hairline fractures. 61 00:07:33,480 --> 00:07:41,010 The spine simultaneously indexes the memory of the originating site, the momentary presence of the glass surface, 62 00:07:41,220 --> 00:07:47,250 and the action of photography, the photographer's gesture and the camera's objective focus. 63 00:07:47,820 --> 00:07:56,820 The place of damage, now incorporated into the image, holds the memory of impact and points to spatial temporal dimensions of looking. 64 00:07:57,660 --> 00:08:06,870 The photograph is not about its trauma, though the violent event remains obscure and cannot be revealed by the material memory alone. 65 00:08:07,470 --> 00:08:18,260 The surface only retains the consequences. The. 66 00:08:22,430 --> 00:08:33,979 So should the 18th century, the 18th century palace on the island in the Lashinsky Park, which is recorded in the crack negative, sustained, 67 00:08:33,980 --> 00:08:42,770 serious damage in the last weeks of 1944, but was carefully reconstructed immediately after the war, as were many of Warsaw's palaces and churches. 68 00:08:43,460 --> 00:08:50,540 There is nothing unique about the particular image stored in this negative little memorial value resides in the captured scene alone. 69 00:08:51,200 --> 00:08:58,310 Photographs shot from the same angle from a similar Scenography training abound in albums showcasing Warsaw's history. 70 00:08:59,060 --> 00:09:09,170 What is, however, both critical and poignant here is the materiality of the negative, which points to further, if inevitably unknowable, stories. 71 00:09:09,890 --> 00:09:17,240 The structured glass, simultaneously so mute and so eloquent, remains the rare material witness of the past, 72 00:09:17,420 --> 00:09:22,790 surviving, as I find it in this fragment of a building in this damaged city. 73 00:09:23,510 --> 00:09:27,920 It is an emblem of the ruination of time held within a ruin of space. 74 00:09:29,360 --> 00:09:37,490 I take this image object as a point of entry into a reflection on the memory of the city as registered in a set of aerial photographs. 75 00:09:38,210 --> 00:09:47,480 It is to act as a reminder of the privilege given here to images over texts as a source of insight for Valter Benyamin, 76 00:09:47,600 --> 00:09:51,590 whose words opened this essay and will guide it through some junctures. 77 00:09:52,040 --> 00:09:56,780 Memory is a substance within which facts of the matter are accumulated. 78 00:09:57,320 --> 00:09:57,770 Justice. 79 00:09:57,770 --> 00:10:08,330 Earth is a medium that holds the remains of dead cities and covered these deposits come to attention as images, as fragments of our understanding. 80 00:10:09,410 --> 00:10:15,620 But dead cities also remain on surfaces in a flotsam of scattered image objects. 81 00:10:16,610 --> 00:10:22,939 These images, ciphers of history, rich in invisible forms, are served as icons. 82 00:10:22,940 --> 00:10:29,450 Here tells us that raw material presents retaining the process of ruination. 83 00:10:29,630 --> 00:10:34,700 They both document and destroy. They come into new visibility. 84 00:10:35,660 --> 00:10:42,560 Edward Casey insists in a specific way on and through surfaces of their representation. 85 00:10:42,890 --> 00:10:50,660 Whenever we may be pointing our attention towards directionality of looking and the location of points of view, 86 00:10:51,080 --> 00:10:59,570 the injured image object at which we look. Ask specifically for a consideration of surfaces where actions are felt, 87 00:11:00,080 --> 00:11:07,610 where consequences are registered, and where viewing is inscribed into the material surfaces. 88 00:11:07,610 --> 00:11:14,150 Disclose points of impact, refract vectors of looking in singularities of contact. 89 00:11:14,300 --> 00:11:24,680 They retain memories of seeing and being seen. These vectors of looking will be closely examined here in a sequence of photographs that resulted from 90 00:11:24,680 --> 00:11:32,240 aerial views that immediately preceded the violence inflicted upon the specific address in which I sit. 91 00:11:32,840 --> 00:11:45,380 The place that still now in its vulnerability in singularities of its objects and surfaces, holds memories of the damage related to material insights. 92 00:11:51,740 --> 00:11:58,480 Surveying occupied also in the Fox Oval fw1 89 the owl aircraft. 93 00:11:58,760 --> 00:12:05,540 On a bright summer day in 1944. It looked to have a photographer captures this view of the palace in Washington's car park. 94 00:12:06,650 --> 00:12:13,549 In the carefully composed aerial closeup, the palace seems desolate against the lush trees, its roof. 95 00:12:13,550 --> 00:12:20,360 A blocky pattern of tiles. Is glass missing in the front windows or these just deep shadows? 96 00:12:21,620 --> 00:12:25,610 The ensemble looks intact, unaffected by the wall. 97 00:12:26,300 --> 00:12:38,390 The grounds are well-tended, grass mowed, lush trees cast shadows on the silhouette of the lake, portraying this fine symmetry of the Palace Ensemble. 98 00:12:38,930 --> 00:12:42,770 The photo, the photograph could be an illustration for a tourist guide book. 99 00:12:43,640 --> 00:12:50,120 What does it what does this image tell me, though, if it is a product of military reconnaissance? 100 00:12:52,430 --> 00:12:58,310 The framing of the shot fuses the skills of the pilot and the discernment of the photographer. 101 00:12:59,090 --> 00:13:05,300 The flight path is aligned with the axis of the palace and the camera angle precisely aimed at the specific view. 102 00:13:06,380 --> 00:13:13,610 The directed looking deployed in navigation of the weapon is coordinated here with a field of vision of the photographing machine, 103 00:13:14,210 --> 00:13:23,540 a defined, a definite aesthetic accomplishment of the presentation of a target through a military spy sighting apparatus. 104 00:13:24,470 --> 00:13:28,129 This is a consummate, consummate target acquisition technique. 105 00:13:28,130 --> 00:13:36,600 As policy review points out, the deadly harmony between the function of the eye and the weapon aided by its agility. 106 00:13:36,740 --> 00:13:44,960 The flying eye, with its almost fully glazed fuselage and camera mounted in a special socket of the floor, 107 00:13:45,290 --> 00:13:55,550 was both a superb seeing weapon and a high definition recording device, a combat apparatus designed to optimise both vision and firing arc. 108 00:13:56,510 --> 00:14:04,790 Here, however, the F W1 89 is flying at a chillingly low altitude over the safe territory of the occupied city. 109 00:14:05,270 --> 00:14:15,290 Although what is at the time the German section of so its target is hardly of military importance, a small palace and still water around it. 110 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:19,910 The image alone is mute about its provenance. 111 00:14:20,450 --> 00:14:27,440 Nothing in the photograph reveals the military plane pointing the camera, nor the contiguity of the aircraft's controls. 112 00:14:27,800 --> 00:14:31,220 The machine gun trigger next to the camera's shutter release. 113 00:14:32,090 --> 00:14:38,480 Not even the obvious proximity of gestures of the photographer, navigator, gunman, pilot are visible here. 114 00:14:39,290 --> 00:14:43,820 Even if the synchronicity of actions is evident in the execution of the shot, 115 00:14:44,960 --> 00:14:51,230 taking the fifth year of the occupation, a year after the annihilation of Warsaw Ghetto, 116 00:14:51,710 --> 00:14:58,610 shortly before the outbreak of the 1944 uprising and the subsequent punitive destruction of the city, 117 00:14:59,000 --> 00:15:06,110 the image in its focus on composition and aesthetics is mute with respect to the photograph time. 118 00:15:07,220 --> 00:15:10,910 Although a product of a little bit of a facility, its details, 119 00:15:11,180 --> 00:15:17,390 which carry no apparent military significance, do not speak of the city outside of the photographed space. 120 00:15:18,170 --> 00:15:24,379 The image alone doesn't disclose the adjacencies involved in its recording conjunctions that 121 00:15:24,380 --> 00:15:30,290 complicate both the photographic act and the resultant document external to its surface. 122 00:15:30,770 --> 00:15:36,350 Here, these proximity to other images need to be carefully considered. 123 00:15:37,850 --> 00:15:43,580 Benyamin tells us that every present is determined by those images that are synchronic. 124 00:15:43,730 --> 00:15:50,299 With it, every now is the now of a specific recognisability read in context. 125 00:15:50,300 --> 00:15:58,880 Then the image in the specific now carries the imprint of the perilous, critical moment on which all reading is founded. 126 00:16:00,230 --> 00:16:06,020 The reading in the now of this photograph is made possible by a chance discovery and a 127 00:16:06,020 --> 00:16:14,390 subsequent act of protection fused with a deliberate destruction found in 1989 1986, 128 00:16:14,630 --> 00:16:19,460 in the attic of a private house in road and deposited in photo Marburg. 129 00:16:19,790 --> 00:16:26,419 The set of negatives that included this image was like an unexploded bomb that the highly 130 00:16:26,420 --> 00:16:31,850 flammable nitrate based film had to be destroyed and the negatives preserved in copies. 131 00:16:32,710 --> 00:16:40,070 Now, only adjacencies of other frames thickened the meaningful surface of the image specifying the context. 132 00:16:40,190 --> 00:16:49,730 The now of my reading a set of 110 negatives from the Luftwaffe, a 1944 survey of Warsaw is included among the. 133 00:16:50,340 --> 00:16:56,370 Of over 3000 aerial views of German cities from the years 1943 and 44. 134 00:16:56,880 --> 00:17:05,280 The killer live to be archive as it is described on our books website was part of the inventory created 135 00:17:05,280 --> 00:17:12,300 for the Planning Commission for the post-War Reconstruction of German cities led by Albert Speer. 136 00:17:13,620 --> 00:17:22,829 Warsaw is included in that archive alongside the German cities bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1940 244, such as Lübeck, 137 00:17:22,830 --> 00:17:31,560 Hamburg and Frankfurt, as well as those like Dresden whose destruction in Allied Right raids was to come later. 138 00:17:32,400 --> 00:17:39,300 Many of the photographs are studies of specific landmarks, in some cases showing the buildings with the adjacent ruins. 139 00:17:40,020 --> 00:17:48,060 Warsaw is an odd component of the archive, the only city in the inventory that had been bombed by looking after itself. 140 00:17:49,110 --> 00:17:57,240 Curiously, its photographs form the largest subset with the images of the oceanic epoch accounting for a quarter of the whole grouping. 141 00:17:58,230 --> 00:18:02,040 There also photographs seem different in content as well. 142 00:18:02,670 --> 00:18:09,000 They include what seems like attempts at obtaining desired views with repeated approaches to targets, 143 00:18:09,300 --> 00:18:18,090 shots taken from various attitudes and altitudes and angles and experiments with framing among portraits of buildings. 144 00:18:18,150 --> 00:18:22,290 There are images that look like studies of the morphology of ruins. 145 00:18:23,430 --> 00:18:32,159 This material registration differs in content and organisation from typical military aerial photographs, such as we find, for example, 146 00:18:32,160 --> 00:18:37,139 in the massive archive of Lord Balfour military intelligence images captured by 147 00:18:37,140 --> 00:18:42,629 the allied forces in the last days of the war and designated with a codename G. 148 00:18:42,630 --> 00:18:48,930 X. Typical reconnaissance photographs either gather details of intended targets or 149 00:18:48,930 --> 00:18:54,420 document the ruins scape and thus the extent and effectiveness of the military action. 150 00:18:55,050 --> 00:19:02,550 Reconnaissance photographs can be relied on for military intelligence, for details of scale and altitude, orientation, 151 00:19:02,640 --> 00:19:11,760 camera specifications and positions, coordinates of the targets and details of the specific mission compared with a GCS inventory. 152 00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:18,840 The images gathered in the killer Lewisville Dalkeith resemble pictures from a wartime tourist guidebook 153 00:19:19,170 --> 00:19:26,100 or illustrations from an album on architectural history rather than documentation from a military survey. 154 00:19:32,260 --> 00:19:39,069 Heading northwest from the Ocean Park. The fww1 89 flies over low, 155 00:19:39,070 --> 00:19:47,620 although the Platts checks issued its distinct schedule marking the Church of St Alexander as if breaching the bell towers. 156 00:19:47,830 --> 00:19:55,120 Its wings span across the surface. Collage of roof tiles crudely patched up after earlier damage was a failure 157 00:19:55,120 --> 00:20:01,510 caused by the 1939 blitz at a safe distance from the trajectory of the shadow. 158 00:20:02,440 --> 00:20:10,830 A young woman in a bright dress walks towards a tram on the lower steps by a belt by the bell tower. 159 00:20:10,840 --> 00:20:21,640 A bulky figure of a beggar sits, whose shadow has a moment earlier been spared from momentary absorption by the wing of the plane to the left. 160 00:20:23,290 --> 00:20:33,340 Along the tenement, a man in a trenchcoat briefcase in one hand strides hurriedly down the sidewalk, as if keeping ahead of the of the owl. 161 00:20:34,120 --> 00:20:38,560 His right arm bench in front of him in a recognisable gesture. 162 00:20:39,130 --> 00:20:51,310 He's checking the time on his wristwatch. At the bottom of the photograph, at the edge of the paved aisle directly within the flight path. 163 00:20:51,760 --> 00:20:57,620 A single observer faces the sky a moment earlier in a perilous, critical moment. 164 00:20:57,940 --> 00:21:01,480 The left wing of aircraft touched him with its shadow. 165 00:21:04,860 --> 00:21:08,160 You've looked sensitive extensively on the eastern front. 166 00:21:08,640 --> 00:21:12,900 The F.W. on 89 was known on the ground as a rama. 167 00:21:13,200 --> 00:21:24,210 The frame, a reference to the characteristic shape of its tail boom that facilitated visibility here focussed on the Church of Saint Alexander. 168 00:21:24,360 --> 00:21:29,820 The airborne camera is tightly cropping the context out of the space of the photograph. 169 00:21:31,200 --> 00:21:40,290 The damage to the square evident in the larger large sections of cleared ruins which testify to the 1939 aerial attack, 170 00:21:40,650 --> 00:21:45,990 are only vaguely indexed by the fenced off emptiness at the edges of the image, 171 00:21:47,340 --> 00:21:56,250 the signature shape of the aircraft, an ominous shadow marking both the photographed space and the space of the photograph scores. 172 00:21:56,460 --> 00:22:00,870 Not only this image, but it touches every image from the sortie. 173 00:22:01,410 --> 00:22:06,810 Simultaneously marking on Warsaw surfaces a superb cropping instrument. 174 00:22:07,140 --> 00:22:12,060 The urban frame framing the ruins frames the now of my looking. 175 00:22:14,820 --> 00:22:26,820 So it's viewed within a set of photographs gathered for the album entitled Version of That New Solution. 176 00:22:26,820 --> 00:22:30,209 You need to keep photography look neutral structure shouldn't be interested. 177 00:22:30,210 --> 00:22:38,910 Just try to go tackle war. So the last glance German aerial photographs from before the August 1944 uprising. 178 00:22:39,750 --> 00:22:51,020 The image is framed by a sense of premonition. The stillness of the scene registers the looming contrast with what is to come later that summer, 179 00:22:51,560 --> 00:22:55,190 the violent rapture of the uprising and the imminent herbicide. 180 00:22:56,090 --> 00:23:00,470 Nothing in the photographs, though, tells me that the city is going to die. 181 00:23:01,370 --> 00:23:05,810 This intuition resides in the adjacencies of the image object. 182 00:23:06,140 --> 00:23:13,400 In the now of its reading, I read to the sense of foreboding into the image staged by the wording. 183 00:23:13,580 --> 00:23:17,120 The photograph abides by the dictum of the book's title. 184 00:23:19,430 --> 00:23:27,380 Selected as the cover image of the album. The photograph is transformed from a presentiment into the testimony. 185 00:23:28,190 --> 00:23:40,250 It becomes an indication of the imminent future placed in the past, now capturing the marking of the place with a menacing shadow in its specificity. 186 00:23:40,610 --> 00:23:43,790 The photograph makes vivid the precise moment of looking. 187 00:23:44,420 --> 00:23:47,480 The last glance. Whose glance is it? 188 00:23:48,020 --> 00:23:52,550 Mine. The images reader is expected to return. 189 00:23:53,210 --> 00:24:00,230 Mine is not a quick look either. The image demands, as Benyamin noted, a meticulous examination, 190 00:24:00,410 --> 00:24:08,030 a scrutiny then rather than a glance and intensely inquiring, asking questions of this photograph. 191 00:24:08,930 --> 00:24:15,710 Is it a bow and a glance? Then, as Casey would tell me, vigilant in a way pertinent to orientation. 192 00:24:16,610 --> 00:24:26,360 It fastens on particular things and places and directs me towards the orienting surfaces and objects in its mobility. 193 00:24:26,570 --> 00:24:33,880 The glance choreographs proximity. It also signifies that what it captures is its visual. 194 00:24:34,490 --> 00:24:39,930 In its visual net is sudden in its appearance in the flash of realisation. 195 00:24:39,950 --> 00:24:46,400 I see my looking reflected in the pilot photographer's scrutiny of the city's surfaces. 196 00:24:48,080 --> 00:24:53,780 Is it perhaps his glance then his aerial stroll around Warsaw on a summer day, 197 00:24:54,290 --> 00:24:59,450 a tourist glancing around for best views to capture with his high tech camera. 198 00:25:00,290 --> 00:25:04,490 Is this image a snapshot in a set of souvenirs from the eastern front? 199 00:25:05,300 --> 00:25:12,650 I have said, in recognition of the pilot photographer's urge to frame his own shadow, marking the surface of the image. 200 00:25:13,400 --> 00:25:24,720 Here his playful glance facilitates my looking at the non a yet completely destroyed war so surpassed the past thus preserved by the Luftwaffe, 201 00:25:25,340 --> 00:25:33,440 the very apparatus of its ruination. The building framed by the shadow will have been destroyed in a few weeks time, 202 00:25:33,740 --> 00:25:40,310 but then rebuilt right after the war, substantially altered, corrected to obtain a more desired look. 203 00:25:41,210 --> 00:25:44,420 But the city was no longer whole at the time of the sculpture. 204 00:25:44,780 --> 00:25:47,780 It was already a horribly fractured image object. 205 00:25:48,560 --> 00:25:53,990 Only the view from above still holds it as a singular image on the ground. 206 00:25:54,110 --> 00:26:00,890 Its shattered surfaces resist completeness voids gaping in incomprehension. 207 00:26:02,990 --> 00:26:09,710 There is a sense of disquiet in the proximity of the aircraft to the city surface in the deliberate framing of the scene. 208 00:26:10,640 --> 00:26:15,920 But I think shadows as the key points of this quietude of indeterminacy, 209 00:26:16,280 --> 00:26:24,229 allusive and shifting points of attachment for the vectors of looking and of being seen in the images that follow. 210 00:26:24,230 --> 00:26:28,800 I will truck three shadows, then each anchoring a different point of seeing. 211 00:26:29,990 --> 00:26:36,020 One is fastened to the pointed silhouette of the aircraft, ominously indexing the tenement courtyard. 212 00:26:36,830 --> 00:26:46,010 It acts as a point and detecting object, foreshadowing the destruction to come that will have been of the trauma of the ordinary spaces of the city. 213 00:26:47,060 --> 00:26:50,750 Another is attached to the irregular scar of the flattened ghetto. 214 00:26:51,290 --> 00:26:59,000 The achingly bare had been the acute outline of emptiness, indexing the future condition of absence. 215 00:26:59,960 --> 00:27:10,120 They both amplify, amplified the force of the third vector, tethered to a specific address attached to a shadow of a building bump. 216 00:27:10,160 --> 00:27:19,729 Soon after the aerial documentation, it shifts my direction of looking, forcing me close to the surface, reminding me to consider the material, 217 00:27:19,730 --> 00:27:26,720 traces of seeing and being seen to locate the specific places of the consequences of the view from above. 218 00:27:33,020 --> 00:27:41,630 Flying north along now along a different path, approaching the train station that shot a governor along a lady Rosalyn skin. 219 00:27:42,080 --> 00:27:52,910 The F.W. 189 photographs its shadow, posing in posing inside a tenements courtyard a moment before the plane slides its silhouette over him. 220 00:27:53,540 --> 00:28:04,100 A young man in dark jacket, hands in his pockets, makes eye contact with a flying high from the small house behind him, 221 00:28:04,400 --> 00:28:08,060 an oddly looking cottage pressed against all party walls. 222 00:28:09,410 --> 00:28:11,000 Other observers spill out. 223 00:28:11,810 --> 00:28:19,010 There are two figures near the front porch on the right, two standing by the little shed at the foot of the towering white wall. 224 00:28:19,520 --> 00:28:24,500 One more nearly touching the tip of the fuselage facing the sky. 225 00:28:24,620 --> 00:28:27,740 The whole group suddenly stills in singular focus, 226 00:28:28,040 --> 00:28:36,650 while the objects of their gaze marks the courtyard with a dark stain of obstructed light guiding the aircraft. 227 00:28:37,070 --> 00:28:45,230 The shadow confronted here with a real presence that raunchier beliefs is to be found in the captured moments of indeterminacy. 228 00:28:46,160 --> 00:28:54,860 It is a mark of both concealing and exposing. It specifies vectors of looking and those of apprehension in the shadow. 229 00:28:55,130 --> 00:28:59,840 The momentary presence of the aircraft is witnessed in the courtyard simultaneously 230 00:28:59,840 --> 00:29:06,140 by the photographer camera and the chance photographed subjects or spectators. 231 00:29:07,040 --> 00:29:11,929 It is a haunting presence that Casey speaks of experienced when the photograph 232 00:29:11,930 --> 00:29:17,360 suddenly captures a glance that issues from the subject towards the photographer. 233 00:29:18,470 --> 00:29:23,690 It carries the spectators witnessing of the photographic act and of the very act of looking. 234 00:29:25,130 --> 00:29:32,480 The courtyard surfaces register the silhouette of the aircraft at the moment of fixing this event in the material of the film. 235 00:29:33,320 --> 00:29:42,320 The glance of the photographer here, a complex apparatus extending human action calls out for that of the spectator. 236 00:29:42,650 --> 00:29:48,590 The city and closing human presence. It captures dialectic of looks. 237 00:29:49,310 --> 00:29:58,670 The picture object of the revealed event is now looking out towards us as its current viewers, as it currents viewers. 238 00:29:58,880 --> 00:30:05,270 And in this looking case, he writes through the physical photograph that presents it. 239 00:30:05,500 --> 00:30:13,620 It produce. Located in the spatial temporal relationships to this to its object. 240 00:30:13,620 --> 00:30:18,270 That shadow constitutes a peculiar, peculiar index. 241 00:30:19,290 --> 00:30:29,010 It extends the object through a hinged like a decency and mobile positioning, yet loyal to the time alone. 242 00:30:29,190 --> 00:30:33,870 It disregards the place way, locating the coincidence of presence. 243 00:30:35,370 --> 00:30:38,730 Despite their attachments, shadows keep a distance. 244 00:30:39,060 --> 00:30:43,350 Vocabulary tells us they do not wholly belong to their objects. 245 00:30:44,100 --> 00:30:47,550 Just like the shadow of the wall doesn't belong to the wall. 246 00:30:48,330 --> 00:30:51,450 The shadows have abandoned objects they belong to. 247 00:30:52,080 --> 00:30:59,070 They belong entirely to. This afternoon that is about to end unstable, 248 00:30:59,430 --> 00:31:07,610 whether in their presence or absence they cannot be relied upon for remaining in place in their marking of singular events, 249 00:31:07,620 --> 00:31:09,930 though the unequal vectors of looking, 250 00:31:10,080 --> 00:31:19,500 activating or intensifying memory, touching the ground, pointing to the strange assembly of buildings hidden in the courtyard, 251 00:31:19,920 --> 00:31:24,520 the shadow of the frame exposes a manifold of vulnerabilities. 252 00:31:25,560 --> 00:31:34,620 Already at the moment of taking the photograph. The tiny cottage encircled by tall tenements is an odd survivor in the centre of a city. 253 00:31:35,520 --> 00:31:44,150 It comes into visibility with its set of material memories clinging onto the surfaces of the courtyard, protected, as it were. 254 00:31:44,520 --> 00:31:47,520 Within the impossibility of casting its own shadow. 255 00:31:49,020 --> 00:31:55,950 Cold walls to the north. The distances between the crushed shadows of the tenements flanking the courtyard. 256 00:31:56,580 --> 00:32:03,090 And a low, abandoned, boarded up annexe, closing it along the south edge. 257 00:32:05,620 --> 00:32:11,140 Oh shelter this diminutive building while ensuring its access to light. 258 00:32:12,130 --> 00:32:16,630 Only the urban shadow. Only a presence from above can touch it. 259 00:32:17,170 --> 00:32:25,510 Only the aerial view can expose its precarious condition in the traditional morphology of Warsaw tenements. 260 00:32:25,540 --> 00:32:30,900 The courtyard was an intimate territory, a node in the networks of movements, 261 00:32:30,910 --> 00:32:35,260 the system of localised commerce and the infrastructure for social relations. 262 00:32:35,950 --> 00:32:41,830 In a few weeks after the taking of this photograph, it will become a centre of the violence inflicted on the city. 263 00:32:42,130 --> 00:32:47,320 A place of shelter, of battle, of players between aerial attacks and of quick burials. 264 00:32:47,950 --> 00:32:58,599 Later, still, as a result of the destruction, that is to ensure the courtyard will become a critical tool in the ideological battle of the new regime, 265 00:32:58,600 --> 00:33:08,050 where the condition of light between the buildings, the shadows cast by the tenements will be deployed in the post-war urban reconfiguration. 266 00:33:09,700 --> 00:33:13,210 Elaborating the relationships between violence and architecture, 267 00:33:13,450 --> 00:33:22,480 Andrew Hirsch contends that a violent alchemy must take place in order to transform a building into a target into a routine. 268 00:33:23,560 --> 00:33:30,730 Part of this alchemy is discursive. Certain stories about architecture, guide and legitimate to these transformations. 269 00:33:31,480 --> 00:33:34,630 These are stories of spatial legitimacy and privilege. 270 00:33:35,380 --> 00:33:44,230 The discourse on hierarchies of reconstruction that legibility, the legality of violence enacted through and against the urban fabric. 271 00:33:45,010 --> 00:33:51,270 The events of dislocations and dispositions under the condition of occupation here. 272 00:33:51,430 --> 00:33:57,370 The memory of past transposition and convergence and the premonition of the transformations 273 00:33:57,370 --> 00:34:03,370 still to come are indicated in the singular condition of the ordinary tenements courtyard. 274 00:34:04,510 --> 00:34:13,480 Violence targeting cities continues is enacted by denying the ordinary places and buildings there are singularity, 275 00:34:13,810 --> 00:34:16,840 denying them consideration as architecture, 276 00:34:17,470 --> 00:34:26,500 as objects and spaces for living, for their living, and positing them instead as generic objects in historical discourses. 277 00:34:27,940 --> 00:34:31,180 Exposing the single moment of the captured aerial view. 278 00:34:31,480 --> 00:34:38,620 The curious dwelling hidden in the courtyard carries radical dislocations and transformations already obstructing the city. 279 00:34:39,430 --> 00:34:50,230 It is not in a photograph of an iconic building whether a palace, a church or other historical landmark that complexities of city memories are found. 280 00:34:50,710 --> 00:34:56,740 Rather, it is the ordinary surfaces and places of dwelling, singular glances of chance, 281 00:34:56,740 --> 00:35:02,740 spectators and objects of spatial temporal vulnerability that give testimonies that 282 00:35:02,740 --> 00:35:09,670 require the kind of meticulous examination of the memorial debris demanded by Benyamin. 283 00:35:16,830 --> 00:35:27,000 Over crashing squeaks, crushing ski at its northern edge, where she continues Cass Street intersects with the square's central axis benefactor Oscar. 284 00:35:27,780 --> 00:35:32,130 The urban camera captures a formal composition of diagonals. 285 00:35:33,210 --> 00:35:41,760 Each segment of the photographed space a distinct morphology of ruination, a completely obliterated, targeted section of the city, 286 00:35:42,780 --> 00:35:53,879 a spot damaged traditional tenement block, an empty space cleared of rubble from the earlier bombardment and an imminent ruin is still intact. 287 00:35:53,880 --> 00:36:04,200 Palace with its palace with its gardens, the axis of the image converge in a deep gash in that precariously sited building in the centre. 288 00:36:04,950 --> 00:36:11,639 The puncture in the roof of the annexe of the palace of collateral targeted damage highlights the 289 00:36:11,640 --> 00:36:17,280 precision of the violence enacted on the dome boarded space at the top section of the photograph, 290 00:36:17,940 --> 00:36:21,150 the liquidated ghetto adjacent to the square. 291 00:36:22,500 --> 00:36:25,740 The crisply drawn wall, uninterrupted by damage, 292 00:36:25,980 --> 00:36:34,080 is now a redundant outline of the space clearly marked by the mutilation of its surface within its boundary. 293 00:36:34,320 --> 00:36:44,220 The wall contains the city turned into a scarred plane, punctuated by sharp verticals of still standing fragments of facades. 294 00:36:44,370 --> 00:36:59,279 And Barty was at a glance. The total destruction is registered as an unvarying brightness and variable intensity overexposure in the photograph. 295 00:36:59,280 --> 00:37:06,989 The tragedy of that which had been and the foreshadowing of the will have been come to 296 00:37:06,990 --> 00:37:12,980 a heightened visibility in the signs of the ordinary that are adjacent to the ghetto. 297 00:37:16,410 --> 00:37:21,930 The damage tenement on the right, its front still marked with a signboard of the furniture store. 298 00:37:22,230 --> 00:37:31,260 Meddler overlooks the vast space of a bleak playground on whose cleared surface traces of removed buildings are still visible. 299 00:37:32,460 --> 00:37:36,960 Five swings are in use at the moment, and a group of school boys, their heads raised, 300 00:37:37,290 --> 00:37:47,040 look up right into the camera at the lower edge of the at the launch of the image around shape. 301 00:37:47,370 --> 00:37:59,070 A carousel is reading its reading predicated upon recalling Chatsworth mi wash washes poem Campo de Fiore on the left, 302 00:37:59,700 --> 00:38:03,000 the water reservoir in front of the crushing ski palace, 303 00:38:03,450 --> 00:38:08,909 a premonition of its futility in fighting the failure of a few months later a 304 00:38:08,910 --> 00:38:16,440 pointless figure considering the scorched terrain nearby with its contiguity severed, 305 00:38:16,590 --> 00:38:20,160 the annexe of the palace is now an absurd political share. 306 00:38:20,970 --> 00:38:26,400 No longer connecting buildings across the square, it is a divider between the spaces it overlooks. 307 00:38:27,300 --> 00:38:34,860 Still allowing passages into the void, its city to its north, pinned down in its position by the vertical puncture. 308 00:38:35,280 --> 00:38:38,460 It is now a material witness to death and survival. 309 00:38:39,450 --> 00:38:47,700 In the summer of 1944, a year after the liquidation of the ghetto, the building remains an immobilised onlooker. 310 00:38:48,180 --> 00:38:52,530 It is still unable to reconcile the disjuncture of its split vision, 311 00:38:53,280 --> 00:39:00,960 the impossibility of experiencing the simultaneously opposing directions of seeing in the now of this photograph. 312 00:39:01,320 --> 00:39:11,670 This former court building remains a material witness to the wartime tragedy of its location, with a prospect across a continuous scar. 313 00:39:11,820 --> 00:39:19,380 The views from one side of the building registered the physical construction of the racial division within the city, 314 00:39:19,920 --> 00:39:30,750 marking the spaces as Jewish and Aryan, and the subsequent erasure of the part of that show designated and closed as Jewish Quarter. 315 00:39:31,800 --> 00:39:37,440 It witness the city deployed as a tool of any relation of one third of its inhabitants 316 00:39:37,770 --> 00:39:42,210 and its total destruction within the area marked as the space of the other. 317 00:39:43,140 --> 00:39:47,970 The city will remain fractured ever since. Towards the square, 318 00:39:48,270 --> 00:39:56,040 the bombing of the tenements in the Blitz of 1939 would be seen as would the weapons piled up high after 319 00:39:56,040 --> 00:40:01,680 the surrender and the subsequent clearing of the roll into buildings for the makeshift playground. 320 00:40:02,730 --> 00:40:07,140 The building witnessed the turning of the city into an instrument of occupation, 321 00:40:07,800 --> 00:40:15,000 a massive process of relocations, dispossession, annexations and conversions that took place. 322 00:40:15,510 --> 00:40:25,740 In order to claim spaces as Northfield, Deutscher and those designated for the others along currently discussed Street. 323 00:40:25,890 --> 00:40:31,590 The lone tenement at the edge of the Palace Garden overlooks the field of destruction. 324 00:40:32,580 --> 00:40:40,080 The building's sharp shadow, folding itself over the defensive wall, enters the space of the real memory of the ghetto. 325 00:40:41,310 --> 00:40:52,830 It touches the absence of the house across the street facing the world in the section of the city, its shadow routinely crossing to the other side. 326 00:40:53,160 --> 00:40:57,120 The tenement has been a witness to looking at witness to witnessing. 327 00:40:57,750 --> 00:41:05,340 Now its shadow points to absent surfaces of past seeing it outlines the memory of being seen. 328 00:41:06,090 --> 00:41:16,560 If seeing is visiting as we learn from Michel Serre, then an act of seeing demands coming forward, crossing roads, assuming positions, 329 00:41:17,340 --> 00:41:21,870 but seeing also issues from immobility, from a fixed stair, 330 00:41:22,230 --> 00:41:27,870 the denial of movement from disregarding the glance coming from the object being looked at, 331 00:41:28,890 --> 00:41:38,040 the shadow moving over over the wall of the ghetto crossing to the other side marks the place where the vectors of looking are attached, 332 00:41:38,550 --> 00:41:47,340 where the memories from before the city's forced segregation and those of the city's complicity in death and survival are located. 333 00:41:49,860 --> 00:41:55,169 The sharp mark of the tenements crossing points and the sharp mark of the tenements 334 00:41:55,170 --> 00:42:01,110 crossing points out that the overexposed space voided from the city is not empty. 335 00:42:02,280 --> 00:42:12,390 On the bleak plains of ruination. Shadows index sudden presences in signs of human activity. 336 00:42:13,350 --> 00:42:25,379 A figure marked by a vertical line. A gun slung over the shoulder is guiding, is guarding a group at work, a few men carrying, lifting, 337 00:42:25,380 --> 00:42:36,240 piling up material against the wall along a fracture scar neatly stacked, sorted piles of objects of similar shapes lie prepared for collection. 338 00:42:37,290 --> 00:42:40,400 The material of the liquidated ghetto is being segregated. 339 00:42:40,470 --> 00:42:45,450 Sort it out. Is it for the reconstruction of the German cities? 340 00:42:47,100 --> 00:42:49,770 For Albert's fierce plan on Sharp, 341 00:42:51,330 --> 00:43:01,350 Pasha insists that damage transforms a building from an object with precise uses and meanings into a treasure trove of materiality, 342 00:43:01,650 --> 00:43:09,630 into heaps of stuff and clouds of smoke that easily even necessarily serve as substantiation of violence. 343 00:43:10,590 --> 00:43:20,160 Here, the designated area of separation first became an instrument of the dehumanisation in the time of the photograph, 344 00:43:20,340 --> 00:43:26,910 still raw from the violence of destruction. It is being materialised through segregation. 345 00:43:27,630 --> 00:43:37,410 It will soon become a sign of absence. The ghetto wall, an instrument of violence performed on the city, will take on a memorial significance, 346 00:43:37,830 --> 00:43:45,120 while the city within its boundary, its architecture, the space of living for the living would be confined to oblivion. 347 00:43:45,600 --> 00:43:55,710 Its insight denied. In the last photograph that I will consider here. 348 00:43:56,100 --> 00:44:03,060 The F.W. 189 gaining height and turning south is flying right above a small street. 349 00:44:03,870 --> 00:44:06,810 It doesn't register anything worthy of close scrutiny. 350 00:44:07,440 --> 00:44:13,890 It seems focussed on the rigid geometry of the National Museum and on the compositional diagonals of the image. 351 00:44:14,970 --> 00:44:24,290 The axis of the photograph along Elliott stretching Amaya, then button back and of Strasser intersecting with novitiate. 352 00:44:24,600 --> 00:44:25,460 Oh, sorry. 353 00:44:30,210 --> 00:44:41,130 Intersecting with novitiate at the lower right and with the line of the escarpment in the upper left corner frames one of the key sites of Warsaw. 354 00:44:41,910 --> 00:44:50,850 Here beside the museum, the Communist Party headquarters will be built soon after the war, asserting a new spatial regime for the city. 355 00:44:51,720 --> 00:44:59,760 The tenements along the street cleared to ensure visibility across the new parade grounds in the time of the photograph. 356 00:44:59,820 --> 00:45:01,379 Small, north and narrow street. 357 00:45:01,380 --> 00:45:13,680 Parallel to Alya Trichet, Gomera is still intact and only the houses along the near nearby foxhole reveal extensive war damage. 358 00:45:13,770 --> 00:45:20,880 The rooftops missing floor plans exposed to scrutiny from above before the summer ends. 359 00:45:21,180 --> 00:45:25,500 The rooftops of small enough will be similarly opened up by fires. 360 00:45:26,220 --> 00:45:34,620 The aerial attack sharing the tenement at number 36 and reducing its annexe to a ruin will come later that year. 361 00:45:36,480 --> 00:45:43,470 Inside the studio. Inside the studio. 362 00:45:43,560 --> 00:45:52,530 I'm examining this photograph in the album War. So the last glance I'm looking at the cluster of shadows cast by the back annexes of smoke. 363 00:45:52,530 --> 00:46:01,080 Now in a sudden moment of realisation, one rectangle of blocked light hinged on the blind wall. 364 00:46:01,800 --> 00:46:07,920 Blind party wall becomes the point of singularity in the name of my reading. 365 00:46:08,460 --> 00:46:13,590 It is a shadow of the absence of the House of the Missing stories above the studio space. 366 00:46:14,730 --> 00:46:20,730 In recording the building's past presence, the photograph makes visible the present absence. 367 00:46:21,960 --> 00:46:29,820 The shadow affirms the place's spatial memory, linking that then of the image with the material vulnerability of this site. 368 00:46:29,940 --> 00:46:34,049 In the now of my looking, it becomes a punk film. 369 00:46:34,050 --> 00:46:41,400 In Russia's sense, a tangle of indeterminacy is a point of tension between the known and the unknown. 370 00:46:42,150 --> 00:46:51,480 It extends the notion, however, into the materiality of puncture, a point of impact, an index of loss where the unsold salt resides. 371 00:46:55,620 --> 00:47:05,630 Well when she seeks offensiveness in art images, I'm tracking the insights of the surfaces viewed by the urban weapon in their indeterminacy. 372 00:47:05,820 --> 00:47:14,990 These surfaces and vectors of looking and those of seeing, they cohere objects, directing movements, specifying positions and distances. 373 00:47:15,300 --> 00:47:16,500 The frame places, 374 00:47:16,710 --> 00:47:27,660 locating and affecting their viewing and their views through the shadows cast upon them surfaces mark time in singularities of contact, 375 00:47:27,780 --> 00:47:33,810 points of impact. Memories come into view. Sudden moments of insight surface to attention. 376 00:47:35,010 --> 00:47:40,589 These moments are marked by a vertiginous disquiet, a whirl of details, 377 00:47:40,590 --> 00:47:47,220 a vortex of local histories, a vertigo of things that attention compels us to follow. 378 00:47:48,420 --> 00:47:57,270 Vertigo, Mark Dorian notes, is not about the height or looking down, but a certain grounding, a sense of imminent fall. 379 00:47:57,870 --> 00:48:02,700 It is dizziness, triggered by a sudden awareness of distance or proximity, 380 00:48:02,940 --> 00:48:10,560 a sense of anxiety set off by changing the axis of viewing and sensing a pool of a spiralling force. 381 00:48:11,340 --> 00:48:18,629 Vertigo is a surface condition of visibility, of transparency, not just looking through will, 382 00:48:18,630 --> 00:48:23,880 but a sense of falling through the surface, breaking through the surface. 383 00:48:23,880 --> 00:48:33,120 Tension of the now with a higher altitude, moving from a low oblique toward a high vertical. 384 00:48:33,510 --> 00:48:39,180 The aerial photograph becomes thinner in surface detail and abstraction increases. 385 00:48:40,710 --> 00:48:43,920 The unsettling gazes from the ground are no longer registered. 386 00:48:44,460 --> 00:48:51,210 The sense of transparency heightens and some good recalled by the earlier described 387 00:48:51,210 --> 00:48:56,670 glass like transparency of the aerial landscape viewed as a high vertical. 388 00:48:57,600 --> 00:49:05,910 Antoine, since Saint-exupéry likened his looking through the glazed cockpit to examining objects through the glass case in a museum. 389 00:49:07,380 --> 00:49:13,920 Reflecting on looking at the aerial image. Dorian points to the different directional mode of aerial views. 390 00:49:14,220 --> 00:49:17,550 Each focussed on a specific interpretation of the visible. 391 00:49:18,870 --> 00:49:26,740 For saint-exupéry the oblique view, the mode the pilot normally engages with was likened to a sense of coherence. 392 00:49:27,210 --> 00:49:33,180 While the vertical view required for the task of a military observer was about, as Dorian writes, 393 00:49:33,180 --> 00:49:41,759 the vertiginous itemisation of serious of objects in looking in the now of historical aerial photographs, 394 00:49:41,760 --> 00:49:45,540 however, our modes of viewing negotiated differently. 395 00:49:46,200 --> 00:49:57,570 In these images, the vertigo is set off by conflicting temporal dimensions of the views, the vertical for the topography of destruction, 396 00:49:57,960 --> 00:50:05,370 patterns of death and survival, and the oblique in which the detailed texture of places comes to attention. 397 00:50:07,830 --> 00:50:17,280 Benjamin sees memory as a stage, a place where images severed from their context arise into visibility in the name of understanding. 398 00:50:18,600 --> 00:50:22,500 In his metaphor, the buried city simply a city of the past, 399 00:50:22,800 --> 00:50:28,290 its debris accessible through an archaeological procedure of recovery whereby 400 00:50:28,290 --> 00:50:33,960 the deposits are brought out as insights but no major trauma is registered. 401 00:50:35,070 --> 00:50:42,150 What if, however, as is the case in my examination, the urban memory is that of the catastrophe, 402 00:50:42,450 --> 00:50:46,830 of the piling ruin upon ruin witnessed by Benjamin's later figure. 403 00:50:47,100 --> 00:50:51,960 That of the Angela's novels. What if the angel of History, 404 00:50:52,140 --> 00:51:02,300 where both the witness and the instrument of destruction now blind and weighted down by the symbolic debris, as in Anselm Kiefer. 405 00:51:02,550 --> 00:51:10,500 Angel. Angel of history, which coming to visibility not require a different procedure for the memory of urban trauma. 406 00:51:12,480 --> 00:51:15,630 Dorian suggests a possible figure for such a city. 407 00:51:16,980 --> 00:51:23,250 He finds her in a photograph of a child in Warsaw who, in the aftermath of the war, 408 00:51:23,250 --> 00:51:32,010 is shown drawing her house on a blackboard poised on the edge of the vertiginous spiral of her chalk drawing, 409 00:51:32,370 --> 00:51:41,550 depositing line upon line of troubled memories. The girl confronts him both with Hester and with a catastrophe beyond history. 410 00:51:42,450 --> 00:51:52,290 As a figure of absence, I place this image within the frame of our looking in this sequence of photographs, of aerial views of Warsaw. 411 00:52:03,300 --> 00:52:07,880 I should have known. 412 00:52:09,500 --> 00:52:16,920 And that was very moving in politics to to this. 413 00:52:19,790 --> 00:52:29,000 We're discussing today is Professor John Bank from the Department of Modern Literature at the University of Westminster. 414 00:52:30,080 --> 00:52:36,890 His work is largely concerned with issues of place, landscape and politics, 415 00:52:37,550 --> 00:52:46,940 and he has published widely on various aspects of photography, art and literature in relation to issues of visuality and militarisation. 416 00:52:47,930 --> 00:52:55,120 He's the author of Dirty Wars, Landscapes, Power and Waste in Western American Literature, 417 00:52:55,550 --> 00:53:01,520 and he's also the client writer of American Visual Cultures, published in 2005. 418 00:53:02,570 --> 00:53:14,070 Thanks. I wonder if you could say something about the first image that you talked about, 419 00:53:14,070 --> 00:53:21,660 because there was a kind of any chromatic opening which led us into the discussion, 420 00:53:22,350 --> 00:53:33,990 and I was particularly taken with that the way into this sequence of images, because it seems to be a narrative of finding and gathering. 421 00:53:35,040 --> 00:53:40,170 And you talk about finding this image in the studio. 422 00:53:40,350 --> 00:53:48,960 I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that and especially those kind of images that preceded this way, way showed us the context. 423 00:53:49,320 --> 00:54:02,280 Mm hmm. Well, that that image was in a way, it allowed me to conceptualise the entire way. 424 00:54:02,280 --> 00:54:13,770 I wanted to deal with them with the particular collection of images with which I was intrigued. 425 00:54:14,910 --> 00:54:19,650 But I wasn't quite sure what to do with this, how to actually write about it. 426 00:54:20,910 --> 00:54:25,770 I mean, there were a couple of studies of of of that work which were sort of largely descriptive. 427 00:54:25,890 --> 00:54:37,800 And and basically what where I focussed on the fact that this is the last view of your soul and the fact that it was positioned as the last view of, 428 00:54:38,010 --> 00:54:49,830 of war. So as if Warsaw was at the time not destroyed as it in 44, in July 44 it existed. 429 00:54:50,880 --> 00:54:56,130 So, so so. So that and that and that moment actually of realisation. 430 00:54:56,430 --> 00:55:05,460 And then I'm trying to to I'm actually describing that very moment in, in the paper was when I was, when I was looking at that at the, 431 00:55:05,820 --> 00:55:12,720 at the negative and and I mean actually looking at the glass negative is, is that is a very interesting experience. 432 00:55:12,810 --> 00:55:24,300 It's quite moving I think in itself because when one actually touches an object which was right there in the moment of photographing, 433 00:55:24,660 --> 00:55:32,729 that very negative was right there. And and the fact that that that negative was so brittle and I was looking at it, 434 00:55:32,730 --> 00:55:37,890 I was actually holding it all that the glass over the stone floor of that of the studio. 435 00:55:38,430 --> 00:55:45,090 And I had this sense of like sometimes we have with a very delicate object, a fear of falling. 436 00:55:45,690 --> 00:55:50,550 And and there was so and so the brittleness was actually very physical in that way. 437 00:55:51,870 --> 00:55:56,699 And and I was also interested in in how so. 438 00:55:56,700 --> 00:56:07,080 So that was sort of this moment of of of realisation that I really wanted to focus on that felt relation to the ground. 439 00:56:07,290 --> 00:56:11,190 So the aerial view as it is related to the ground and. 440 00:56:11,820 --> 00:56:18,720 And when I went back to the photographs to the looked looked at those photographs, 441 00:56:19,410 --> 00:56:31,620 what was most intriguing and sort of troubling and and and and interesting and interesting in a 442 00:56:31,620 --> 00:56:41,370 troubling way was that you can actually see that the photographer could see people in much detail, 443 00:56:42,090 --> 00:56:51,030 could see the gate of people, could see whether I mean, the woman is wearing a white or bright dress. 444 00:56:51,210 --> 00:56:58,320 There is another woman nearby and she holds the hand of the man who walks with her. 445 00:56:58,320 --> 00:57:02,000 And then he has his trench coat over his arm. 446 00:57:02,010 --> 00:57:05,219 I mean, you see the gate, you see the way people move. 447 00:57:05,220 --> 00:57:13,830 And and so that was really quite a quite, quite important for me to establish the relationship to the specific place. 448 00:57:13,860 --> 00:57:21,479 Yes, I thought that was very striking the way that you you were reading these images kind of 449 00:57:21,480 --> 00:57:28,890 against the grain of the kind of military that their original military reconnaissance uses. 450 00:57:29,380 --> 00:57:38,100 And I wondered how how conscious you were that that was a deliberate act to reclaiming the images from the history. 451 00:57:38,370 --> 00:57:44,279 They kind of come into it because presumably the original photographers in it were 452 00:57:44,280 --> 00:57:49,110 not terribly interested in the fact that somebody was looking up the camera. 453 00:57:49,380 --> 00:57:53,340 So you finding things out there that that they were. Not necessarily. 454 00:57:54,840 --> 00:58:05,070 Yes, but but but the that particular collection is not really a like a proper military reconnaissance. 455 00:58:07,290 --> 00:58:10,650 There are no past flight paths marked on the negatives. 456 00:58:11,070 --> 00:58:18,330 You don't have the altitude. You don't have the camera positions. You really cannot read from the photo, from the photographs or from the negatives. 457 00:58:18,330 --> 00:58:25,830 You cannot read the information that you normally do read from from from proper military photographs. 458 00:58:25,840 --> 00:58:41,069 So so there is a certain curious I mean, the the I, I mean, of course, it's it's I'm not necessarily suggesting that, you know, 459 00:58:41,070 --> 00:58:51,780 that this is that the pilot was was was just basically looking at the city as a kind of in a in a kind of touristy, touristy way. 460 00:58:51,780 --> 00:58:58,470 But but but in a way, that's what you see when you look at at his flight flight path. 461 00:58:59,130 --> 00:59:01,320 I mean, there is nothing military about it. 462 00:59:01,320 --> 00:59:17,580 I mean, he meanders over the over the park and then clearly he positions himself to take that particular street on very deliberate view, 463 00:59:18,030 --> 00:59:20,040 which is I mean, 464 00:59:20,040 --> 00:59:29,100 there are a few attempts and then there is this shot and then there are a few other attempts of of sort of historical buildings in the city, 465 00:59:30,450 --> 00:59:37,630 those who would be considered historical fault for fault for a full length thought that I mean, for the Occupy. 466 00:59:37,680 --> 00:59:42,270 You tell me what Yankee Park was one of the few. 467 00:59:43,310 --> 00:59:47,040 So so there is a there is a static preoccupation. 468 00:59:47,460 --> 00:59:55,800 I saw it in the way the images were taken and which were not sort of military preoccupations, you know, 469 00:59:55,950 --> 01:00:04,379 although the ones with the shadows in could be construed as kind of from the aesthetic point, you're kind of wrong on that. 470 01:00:04,380 --> 01:00:11,250 There shouldn't be a shadow of well, should be it unless unless you know, like we often do when we travel through the cities, 471 01:00:11,550 --> 01:00:16,710 we take our own shadow as a kind of a marker that we've been there, which is sort of interesting. 472 01:00:17,160 --> 01:00:27,330 I thought this was this was something which which which was really interesting because I could that that the the photographer could see his shadow. 473 01:00:27,420 --> 01:00:32,640 So I could see his effect on on the city in a way I could see where he was touching the ground. 474 01:00:32,700 --> 01:00:39,060 I think that's very important because that that the fact that the shadow is there means that the plane is fairly low. 475 01:00:39,810 --> 01:00:46,500 But it also signals a kind of the kind of aggression that's latent in the images, 476 01:00:46,500 --> 01:00:54,120 because there's a trace that it's marked on the ground by that by the kind of surveilling object, 477 01:00:54,600 --> 01:01:01,709 which seems like the tracks negative to be this kind of moment of revelation, if you like, 478 01:01:01,710 --> 01:01:09,600 that something is shown in the photograph, it tells you more about the the historical context than it first appears. 479 01:01:09,690 --> 01:01:16,520 Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I was also I was interested the way that you kind of reading back into the images that, 480 01:01:16,530 --> 01:01:22,020 like this will have been the place where certain acts of violence. 481 01:01:22,650 --> 01:01:30,150 Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So that you could say something about your kind of sense of your own vibe, if you like. 482 01:01:30,510 --> 01:01:36,120 Yeah. In relation to using these as anticipations of new events. 483 01:01:36,630 --> 01:01:42,900 Well, the anticipation is mainly seen in the moment of I mean, 484 01:01:42,900 --> 01:01:54,330 the photographs are taken in July or at least that could be dated from from from from the vegetation and and and the light to the sun. 485 01:01:54,900 --> 01:01:57,960 So it's it's a summer and turn. 486 01:01:58,260 --> 01:02:04,920 And the the sort of the final destruction of the city begun first of on the 1st of August. 487 01:02:05,580 --> 01:02:20,910 So there is a premonition in in the photographs of for those who who well, I mean, also destruction is sort of known after these images. 488 01:02:20,920 --> 01:02:24,560 So this is sort of a pre destruction moment and time. 489 01:02:24,840 --> 01:02:30,360 And it's and the way that the images were read also in the album, 490 01:02:30,360 --> 01:02:35,729 there was a there was a fascination with with this fact that this is a preserved war. 491 01:02:35,730 --> 01:02:45,600 So just before all this destruction. So this moment of of I mean, this is how how the the album how those those images, 492 01:02:45,600 --> 01:02:51,450 when they were found, they were presented that this is sort of just before the war so disappeared. 493 01:02:51,720 --> 01:02:59,390 And there was. So there was something very is the most something that you read into the image that that 494 01:02:59,420 --> 01:03:05,220 that the the will have been would be would be the you kind of resist the glass then you. 495 01:03:05,300 --> 01:03:09,260 Because as you say, it's a long, protracted forensic. 496 01:03:09,470 --> 01:03:16,190 Yes. Archaeological unpacking of shadows traces. 497 01:03:16,520 --> 01:03:24,940 Yes. Yes. And and I guess that's something which which is I mean, 498 01:03:25,210 --> 01:03:35,120 it's really interesting that the how how much looking is packed into the brief description I have of each of the images, 499 01:03:35,120 --> 01:03:46,519 because, I mean, I pored over those images with a magnifying glass as well as I could view them because, 500 01:03:46,520 --> 01:03:50,330 I mean, they they are a phenomena of phenomenal resolution. 501 01:03:50,360 --> 01:03:55,729 I mean, the nitrate images are incredible. And so so the resolution is incredible. 502 01:03:55,730 --> 01:04:00,230 And and they could be viewed at photo artwork in. 503 01:04:02,840 --> 01:04:10,080 I mean, you could you could view them on the large screen. But I was still using a magnifying glass to just see the details and turn. 504 01:04:10,370 --> 01:04:22,790 And it's really so, so so there is and it's almost became like an object of fascination in L.A. and Kent and in a way questioning also they I mean, 505 01:04:22,790 --> 01:04:28,760 my method I mean, what is it that I'm doing? I mean, I'm spending hours looking at this one photograph and what does it matter, really? 506 01:04:30,080 --> 01:04:35,690 And. And then, you know, there were those moments when, for example, on this this image, 507 01:04:36,020 --> 01:04:44,000 this photograph looks entirely still like and I didn't see any any any any person, anybody in the. 508 01:04:44,540 --> 01:04:59,030 So I described it accordingly. And and I also described the oh, there is a and so I describe the stillness of the water and the path beside it. 509 01:04:59,900 --> 01:05:10,070 And there was something really quite interesting because there is this white spot, which is a. 510 01:05:16,940 --> 01:05:20,150 Who is this white spot right here? 511 01:05:20,570 --> 01:05:24,590 And I sort of looked at it and I thought these were flower pots. 512 01:05:25,190 --> 01:05:28,370 I mean, there are some flowering bushes in in a couple of places. 513 01:05:28,370 --> 01:05:32,300 And then I thought these were flower pots. And I said, ignored this spot. 514 01:05:32,690 --> 01:05:35,270 Couldn't see any any any movement anywhere. 515 01:05:35,720 --> 01:05:43,820 And then I described it and just before the French version of that of the of the of the of the essay was published. 516 01:05:44,660 --> 01:05:55,760 And as I was struggling with a translation because I was very particular about the way that I wanted to describe things. 517 01:05:56,870 --> 01:06:01,740 I think I have it further down. So. Some. 518 01:06:03,560 --> 01:06:07,380 I've made. Okay. Okay. 519 01:06:08,670 --> 01:06:14,340 So and then with horror, I actually discovered that these were not flower parts. 520 01:06:14,760 --> 01:06:15,810 I mean, horror, meaning? 521 01:06:16,380 --> 01:06:23,520 I mean, I would have done something which would be really wrong because, I mean, I didn't want it to be an interpretation of the image. 522 01:06:23,520 --> 01:06:26,760 I really wanted to be just a plain description of what's happening. 523 01:06:27,330 --> 01:06:32,970 And there is a group of children you could see them. 524 01:06:38,530 --> 01:06:47,109 Around the bench. So so there was and there was something really incredible about this kind of discovery that there is you know, 525 01:06:47,110 --> 01:06:56,590 that that as incredible as the discovery in the ghetto of of people lifting doing something. 526 01:06:58,390 --> 01:07:07,810 I mean, I cannot really figure out what it is that but the fact that there was a capture of of of of of of of an event in a way, 527 01:07:07,840 --> 01:07:13,280 was really quite because that that kind of flies in the face of the kind of abstracting some 528 01:07:13,330 --> 01:07:21,070 function of the area know that you can locate kind of identifiable use actions and events. 529 01:07:21,520 --> 01:07:22,030 Yes. 530 01:07:22,300 --> 01:07:35,520 And also, I think and that's something which interests me very much, is that we often talk about ruins as if ruins are stone ruins, as if ruins are. 531 01:07:37,630 --> 01:07:40,900 I mean, this is this is just the material. 532 01:07:42,040 --> 01:07:48,970 And and ruins are still filled with human remains. 533 01:07:48,990 --> 01:07:53,010 And and that's very rarely talked about. 534 01:07:53,020 --> 01:08:06,340 I mean, there are very few few a few studies which which actually focus on that, you know, and how much of the ruin is actually human remain. 535 01:08:06,370 --> 01:08:11,470 And so so I wanted to sort of to capture that. 536 01:08:11,480 --> 01:08:15,550 And in in also discuss very often we. 537 01:08:16,880 --> 01:08:21,190 What what I see at least, is that that it's the it's the city. 538 01:08:21,190 --> 01:08:26,050 It's the material of the city which sort of forms this main preoccupation. 539 01:08:26,740 --> 01:08:31,660 So the buildings and especially the iconic buildings or historical buildings or the churches 540 01:08:31,660 --> 01:08:39,160 and the palaces and and and I and I was small and I sort of remain more interested in, 541 01:08:39,550 --> 01:08:50,740 in the ruins of the places of living, ruins of homes, ruins of of, I mean, lives, as well as as dwellings. 542 01:08:51,280 --> 01:08:56,709 Now, I thought it interesting that you said that that you didn't want to interpret the images, but to describe them. 543 01:08:56,710 --> 01:09:06,610 So would you say that your kind of active, prolonged looking is a form of kind of belated witnessing of another, 544 01:09:06,610 --> 01:09:17,470 which is which then becomes a kind of a narrative as you kind of converted that act of looking into a particular kind of form of writing here. 545 01:09:17,710 --> 01:09:22,780 Mm hmm. Which is which? Which does have a kind of poetic quality to it, 546 01:09:23,140 --> 01:09:31,810 which seems quite so self-conscious in the way that the reader is led through these sequence of acts, finding and putting together. 547 01:09:32,110 --> 01:09:38,620 And the text that you read is a is a kind of text which is a is a kind of piecing together well, 548 01:09:38,650 --> 01:09:46,450 the kind of the series of deliberations, which are also joined together through through your active of in these documents. 549 01:09:47,920 --> 01:09:56,590 Yes. Yes. And it's just and it's very I mean, that's something which I'm actually struggling with in a way. 550 01:09:56,590 --> 01:10:00,669 Because because I mean, even when I'm reading, 551 01:10:00,670 --> 01:10:07,960 I'm very self-conscious when I'm reading the text because the the text sort of wants to be read poetically. 552 01:10:08,290 --> 01:10:16,599 And I'm in a kind of lingering way and and with certain pathos and and I'm sort of resisting it. 553 01:10:16,600 --> 01:10:24,070 And then what comes out is a bit of more fragmented reading because I'm becoming really self conscious of, of it. 554 01:10:25,300 --> 01:10:38,680 But it's been really interesting how because very often, I mean, I presented and I think three times that and and the reaction is, 555 01:10:40,510 --> 01:10:45,130 I mean, there was a of an a comment or a reaction on the poetic aspect of the of the. 556 01:10:45,490 --> 01:10:52,389 Of of of of of of of the text. And and I think in some cases, 557 01:10:52,390 --> 01:11:01,030 the poetic is sort of seen as as interpretive as this is my kind of interpretation of of of of images as well, rather than. 558 01:11:01,300 --> 01:11:15,460 So it's sort of. So it's interesting that that because the that the that the poetic aspect of it almost takes away from the objective description. 559 01:11:16,240 --> 01:11:23,740 And I find that kind of fascinating that the form of writing would maybe be in a way suspect if. 560 01:11:27,010 --> 01:11:31,980 In some ways, I suspect of of of sort of, um. 561 01:11:32,560 --> 01:11:41,350 Maybe not. You know, if politic then perhaps not objective then non scholarly, which is sort of interesting as well. 562 01:11:41,350 --> 01:11:43,910 Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.