Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the program.
Wonderful seminar series.
And it is with great pleasure that I can introduce you to our main speaker today.
In Alaska, we'll be talking about vectors of looking and reflections on the lives of others.
Very. Your survey of Warsaw 19, 1944.
Let me ask my senior lecturer in culture and Visual Studies of the University of Edinburgh School of Architecture.
Her research centres on the material manifestations of language and the relationship between sitting and visuality, memory and representation.
And I was the curator and designer of Cold War Neons and Socialist Modernity Exhibition at the Lighthouse in Glasgow in 2009.
Her publications on Socialist City include the special issue of the Journal of Architecture and with the article Warsaw Tracking Tracking the City,
which was co-edited with Mark Dorian in 2010.
Her recent work focuses on forms of writing with the image and includes exactly vectors of looking and reflections on the love of history.
A survey of Warsaw, 1944, in the volume under the title seeing from both the aerial view in Visual Culture,
edited by Mark Dorian and Frederick Purcell, which came out in London in 2013.
There is also another text writing with the photograph, a spaceman description and an architectural text in action,
which was published in and represented a representative of social machines, photography and the production of space.
Published in Arcus University Press in 2013 and now is currently completing a book project on urban memory and visuality.
More so. Surfaces, positions, objects.
Shadows. So it's to you. Thank you very much, Michael.
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.
I want to read it as a as a as one entity, as one text.
So I will not be diverting from it.
But I wanted to briefly afterwards perhaps discuss what happens when a paper is
repositioned in different adjacencies with the different texts and and when it travels.
And so I want to look at it in, in slightly different way.
And maybe we could have a chance to talk about the book project and what happens when that text travels.
And so I quickly will will focus on the site.
Vectors of looking at memory is not an instrument for the exploration of the past, but rather its theatre memories.
The medium of what has been experienced as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried in debris.
Fact of the matter, only deposits layers which deliver only to the most meticulous examination.
What constitutes the true assets hidden within the inner earth?
The images which tone from all former contexts stand like ruins or torsos in the
collector's gallery as the treasures in the prosaic chambers of our belated insights.
And also address 36 Smallness Street, an artist's studio archive hidden in an annexe of a century old tenement.
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.
Its front sheared and its back annexed reduced to a single story.
The studio built into the ruin after the war, supports the disfigured structure from within,
offering a sense of architectonic coherence that is not visible in the exterior,
a solidity of a place set against the material vulnerability of the site outside the trajectory of a falling bomb
registered in a hideous scar on the party wall and in the futility of a staircase that once led to no absent floors,
outlines an architectural section of destruction.
The extent of the damage, however, the sense of the larger trauma,
the tragic topography of the mutilated urban surface can only be seen in a plan view.
The consequences of the aerial attacks six decades prior of a targeting view from above remain scored in the landscape.
Stored in a desk drawer in the studio is a collection of century old glass negatives featuring portraits of Warsaw landmarks.
One of the negatives is damaged.
Its glass sheet shattered into seven shards that originate from a small point of impact, a sharp sudden blow that gouge the centre,
radiating fractures across the brittle plate pieced together assembled on a flat surface,
the glass fragments form a disquieting image object, archiving the photograph within its splintered body.
The negative cannot be held up to the light only when supported by a horizontal plane.
Only when viewed from above can this broken object be regarded as complete.
The potentiality of an image.
I pick up a sharp glass segment from the table, holding it above the stone floor of the studio and feel a sudden vertigo.
A realisation of vertical distance, a vulnerability to impact that this fragment materialises along with the vector of my gaze.
A print made from the fracture to negative renders the image whole not whole again, but whole anew.
Neither the composition or serenity of the pictured scene is disturbed as the puncture coincides with the water surface along the horizontal axis.
The symmetry of the view is retained.
Gentle ripples only underscore the disjuncture between the forces affecting the surface of the glass and those impacting the scene.
The image can no longer be what it would have been before the negatives damage the residue of the past.
Trauma is now sealed in the photograph located in the plane of material absence where the missing piece,
the place of material absence where the missing piece joins long cracks and hairline fractures.
The spine simultaneously indexes the memory of the originating site, the momentary presence of the glass surface,
and the action of photography, the photographer's gesture and the camera's objective focus.
The place of damage, now incorporated into the image, holds the memory of impact and points to spatial temporal dimensions of looking.
The photograph is not about its trauma, though the violent event remains obscure and cannot be revealed by the material memory alone.
The surface only retains the consequences. The.
So should the 18th century, the 18th century palace on the island in the Lashinsky Park, which is recorded in the crack negative, sustained,
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.
There is nothing unique about the particular image stored in this negative little memorial value resides in the captured scene alone.
Photographs shot from the same angle from a similar Scenography training abound in albums showcasing Warsaw's history.
What is, however, both critical and poignant here is the materiality of the negative, which points to further, if inevitably unknowable, stories.
The structured glass, simultaneously so mute and so eloquent, remains the rare material witness of the past,
surviving, as I find it in this fragment of a building in this damaged city.
It is an emblem of the ruination of time held within a ruin of space.
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.
It is to act as a reminder of the privilege given here to images over texts as a source of insight for Valter Benyamin,
whose words opened this essay and will guide it through some junctures.
Memory is a substance within which facts of the matter are accumulated.
Justice.
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.
But dead cities also remain on surfaces in a flotsam of scattered image objects.
These images, ciphers of history, rich in invisible forms, are served as icons.
Here tells us that raw material presents retaining the process of ruination.
They both document and destroy. They come into new visibility.
Edward Casey insists in a specific way on and through surfaces of their representation.
Whenever we may be pointing our attention towards directionality of looking and the location of points of view,
the injured image object at which we look. Ask specifically for a consideration of surfaces where actions are felt,
where consequences are registered, and where viewing is inscribed into the material surfaces.
Disclose points of impact, refract vectors of looking in singularities of contact.
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
aerial views that immediately preceded the violence inflicted upon the specific address in which I sit.
The place that still now in its vulnerability in singularities of its objects and surfaces, holds memories of the damage related to material insights.
Surveying occupied also in the Fox Oval fw1 89 the owl aircraft.
On a bright summer day in 1944. It looked to have a photographer captures this view of the palace in Washington's car park.
In the carefully composed aerial closeup, the palace seems desolate against the lush trees, its roof.
A blocky pattern of tiles. Is glass missing in the front windows or these just deep shadows?
The ensemble looks intact, unaffected by the wall.
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.
The photo, the photograph could be an illustration for a tourist guide book.
What does it what does this image tell me, though, if it is a product of military reconnaissance?
The framing of the shot fuses the skills of the pilot and the discernment of the photographer.
The flight path is aligned with the axis of the palace and the camera angle precisely aimed at the specific view.
The directed looking deployed in navigation of the weapon is coordinated here with a field of vision of the photographing machine,
a defined, a definite aesthetic accomplishment of the presentation of a target through a military spy sighting apparatus.
This is a consummate, consummate target acquisition technique.
As policy review points out, the deadly harmony between the function of the eye and the weapon aided by its agility.
The flying eye, with its almost fully glazed fuselage and camera mounted in a special socket of the floor,
was both a superb seeing weapon and a high definition recording device, a combat apparatus designed to optimise both vision and firing arc.
Here, however, the F W1 89 is flying at a chillingly low altitude over the safe territory of the occupied city.
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.
The image alone is mute about its provenance.
Nothing in the photograph reveals the military plane pointing the camera, nor the contiguity of the aircraft's controls.
The machine gun trigger next to the camera's shutter release.
Not even the obvious proximity of gestures of the photographer, navigator, gunman, pilot are visible here.
Even if the synchronicity of actions is evident in the execution of the shot,
taking the fifth year of the occupation, a year after the annihilation of Warsaw Ghetto,
shortly before the outbreak of the 1944 uprising and the subsequent punitive destruction of the city,
the image in its focus on composition and aesthetics is mute with respect to the photograph time.
Although a product of a little bit of a facility, its details,
which carry no apparent military significance, do not speak of the city outside of the photographed space.
The image alone doesn't disclose the adjacencies involved in its recording conjunctions that
complicate both the photographic act and the resultant document external to its surface.
Here, these proximity to other images need to be carefully considered.
Benyamin tells us that every present is determined by those images that are synchronic.
With it, every now is the now of a specific recognisability read in context.
Then the image in the specific now carries the imprint of the perilous, critical moment on which all reading is founded.
The reading in the now of this photograph is made possible by a chance discovery and a
subsequent act of protection fused with a deliberate destruction found in 1989 1986,
in the attic of a private house in road and deposited in photo Marburg.
The set of negatives that included this image was like an unexploded bomb that the highly
flammable nitrate based film had to be destroyed and the negatives preserved in copies.
Now, only adjacencies of other frames thickened the meaningful surface of the image specifying the context.
The now of my reading a set of 110 negatives from the Luftwaffe, a 1944 survey of Warsaw is included among the.
Of over 3000 aerial views of German cities from the years 1943 and 44.
The killer live to be archive as it is described on our books website was part of the inventory created
for the Planning Commission for the post-War Reconstruction of German cities led by Albert Speer.
Warsaw is included in that archive alongside the German cities bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1940 244, such as Lübeck,
Hamburg and Frankfurt, as well as those like Dresden whose destruction in Allied Right raids was to come later.
Many of the photographs are studies of specific landmarks, in some cases showing the buildings with the adjacent ruins.
Warsaw is an odd component of the archive, the only city in the inventory that had been bombed by looking after itself.
Curiously, its photographs form the largest subset with the images of the oceanic epoch accounting for a quarter of the whole grouping.
There also photographs seem different in content as well.
They include what seems like attempts at obtaining desired views with repeated approaches to targets,
shots taken from various attitudes and altitudes and angles and experiments with framing among portraits of buildings.
There are images that look like studies of the morphology of ruins.
This material registration differs in content and organisation from typical military aerial photographs, such as we find, for example,
in the massive archive of Lord Balfour military intelligence images captured by
the allied forces in the last days of the war and designated with a codename G.
X. Typical reconnaissance photographs either gather details of intended targets or
document the ruins scape and thus the extent and effectiveness of the military action.
Reconnaissance photographs can be relied on for military intelligence, for details of scale and altitude, orientation,
camera specifications and positions, coordinates of the targets and details of the specific mission compared with a GCS inventory.
The images gathered in the killer Lewisville Dalkeith resemble pictures from a wartime tourist guidebook
or illustrations from an album on architectural history rather than documentation from a military survey.
Heading northwest from the Ocean Park. The fww1 89 flies over low,
although the Platts checks issued its distinct schedule marking the Church of St Alexander as if breaching the bell towers.
Its wings span across the surface. Collage of roof tiles crudely patched up after earlier damage was a failure
caused by the 1939 blitz at a safe distance from the trajectory of the shadow.
A young woman in a bright dress walks towards a tram on the lower steps by a belt by the bell tower.
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.
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.
His right arm bench in front of him in a recognisable gesture.
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.
A single observer faces the sky a moment earlier in a perilous, critical moment.
The left wing of aircraft touched him with its shadow.
You've looked sensitive extensively on the eastern front.
The F.W. on 89 was known on the ground as a rama.
The frame, a reference to the characteristic shape of its tail boom that facilitated visibility here focussed on the Church of Saint Alexander.
The airborne camera is tightly cropping the context out of the space of the photograph.
The damage to the square evident in the larger large sections of cleared ruins which testify to the 1939 aerial attack,
are only vaguely indexed by the fenced off emptiness at the edges of the image,
the signature shape of the aircraft, an ominous shadow marking both the photographed space and the space of the photograph scores.
Not only this image, but it touches every image from the sortie.
Simultaneously marking on Warsaw surfaces a superb cropping instrument.
The urban frame framing the ruins frames the now of my looking.
So it's viewed within a set of photographs gathered for the album entitled Version of That New Solution.
You need to keep photography look neutral structure shouldn't be interested.
Just try to go tackle war. So the last glance German aerial photographs from before the August 1944 uprising.
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,
the violent rapture of the uprising and the imminent herbicide.
Nothing in the photographs, though, tells me that the city is going to die.
This intuition resides in the adjacencies of the image object.
In the now of its reading, I read to the sense of foreboding into the image staged by the wording.
The photograph abides by the dictum of the book's title.
Selected as the cover image of the album. The photograph is transformed from a presentiment into the testimony.
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.
The photograph makes vivid the precise moment of looking.
The last glance. Whose glance is it?
Mine. The images reader is expected to return.
Mine is not a quick look either. The image demands, as Benyamin noted, a meticulous examination,
a scrutiny then rather than a glance and intensely inquiring, asking questions of this photograph.
Is it a bow and a glance? Then, as Casey would tell me, vigilant in a way pertinent to orientation.
It fastens on particular things and places and directs me towards the orienting surfaces and objects in its mobility.
The glance choreographs proximity. It also signifies that what it captures is its visual.
In its visual net is sudden in its appearance in the flash of realisation.
I see my looking reflected in the pilot photographer's scrutiny of the city's surfaces.
Is it perhaps his glance then his aerial stroll around Warsaw on a summer day,
a tourist glancing around for best views to capture with his high tech camera.
Is this image a snapshot in a set of souvenirs from the eastern front?
I have said, in recognition of the pilot photographer's urge to frame his own shadow, marking the surface of the image.
Here his playful glance facilitates my looking at the non a yet completely destroyed war so surpassed the past thus preserved by the Luftwaffe,
the very apparatus of its ruination. The building framed by the shadow will have been destroyed in a few weeks time,
but then rebuilt right after the war, substantially altered, corrected to obtain a more desired look.
But the city was no longer whole at the time of the sculpture.
It was already a horribly fractured image object.
Only the view from above still holds it as a singular image on the ground.
Its shattered surfaces resist completeness voids gaping in incomprehension.
There is a sense of disquiet in the proximity of the aircraft to the city surface in the deliberate framing of the scene.
But I think shadows as the key points of this quietude of indeterminacy,
allusive and shifting points of attachment for the vectors of looking and of being seen in the images that follow.
I will truck three shadows, then each anchoring a different point of seeing.
One is fastened to the pointed silhouette of the aircraft, ominously indexing the tenement courtyard.
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.
Another is attached to the irregular scar of the flattened ghetto.
The achingly bare had been the acute outline of emptiness, indexing the future condition of absence.
They both amplify, amplified the force of the third vector, tethered to a specific address attached to a shadow of a building bump.
Soon after the aerial documentation, it shifts my direction of looking, forcing me close to the surface, reminding me to consider the material,
traces of seeing and being seen to locate the specific places of the consequences of the view from above.
Flying north along now along a different path, approaching the train station that shot a governor along a lady Rosalyn skin.
The F.W. 189 photographs its shadow, posing in posing inside a tenements courtyard a moment before the plane slides its silhouette over him.
A young man in dark jacket, hands in his pockets, makes eye contact with a flying high from the small house behind him,
an oddly looking cottage pressed against all party walls.
Other observers spill out.
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.
One more nearly touching the tip of the fuselage facing the sky.
The whole group suddenly stills in singular focus,
while the objects of their gaze marks the courtyard with a dark stain of obstructed light guiding the aircraft.
The shadow confronted here with a real presence that raunchier beliefs is to be found in the captured moments of indeterminacy.
It is a mark of both concealing and exposing. It specifies vectors of looking and those of apprehension in the shadow.
The momentary presence of the aircraft is witnessed in the courtyard simultaneously
by the photographer camera and the chance photographed subjects or spectators.
It is a haunting presence that Casey speaks of experienced when the photograph
suddenly captures a glance that issues from the subject towards the photographer.
It carries the spectators witnessing of the photographic act and of the very act of looking.
The courtyard surfaces register the silhouette of the aircraft at the moment of fixing this event in the material of the film.
The glance of the photographer here, a complex apparatus extending human action calls out for that of the spectator.
The city and closing human presence. It captures dialectic of looks.
The picture object of the revealed event is now looking out towards us as its current viewers, as it currents viewers.
And in this looking case, he writes through the physical photograph that presents it.
It produce. Located in the spatial temporal relationships to this to its object.
That shadow constitutes a peculiar, peculiar index.
It extends the object through a hinged like a decency and mobile positioning, yet loyal to the time alone.
It disregards the place way, locating the coincidence of presence.
Despite their attachments, shadows keep a distance.
Vocabulary tells us they do not wholly belong to their objects.
Just like the shadow of the wall doesn't belong to the wall.
The shadows have abandoned objects they belong to.
They belong entirely to. This afternoon that is about to end unstable,
whether in their presence or absence they cannot be relied upon for remaining in place in their marking of singular events,
though the unequal vectors of looking,
activating or intensifying memory, touching the ground, pointing to the strange assembly of buildings hidden in the courtyard,
the shadow of the frame exposes a manifold of vulnerabilities.
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.
It comes into visibility with its set of material memories clinging onto the surfaces of the courtyard, protected, as it were.
Within the impossibility of casting its own shadow.
Cold walls to the north. The distances between the crushed shadows of the tenements flanking the courtyard.
And a low, abandoned, boarded up annexe, closing it along the south edge.
Oh shelter this diminutive building while ensuring its access to light.
Only the urban shadow. Only a presence from above can touch it.
Only the aerial view can expose its precarious condition in the traditional morphology of Warsaw tenements.
The courtyard was an intimate territory, a node in the networks of movements,
the system of localised commerce and the infrastructure for social relations.
In a few weeks after the taking of this photograph, it will become a centre of the violence inflicted on the city.
A place of shelter, of battle, of players between aerial attacks and of quick burials.
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,
where the condition of light between the buildings, the shadows cast by the tenements will be deployed in the post-war urban reconfiguration.
Elaborating the relationships between violence and architecture,
Andrew Hirsch contends that a violent alchemy must take place in order to transform a building into a target into a routine.
Part of this alchemy is discursive. Certain stories about architecture, guide and legitimate to these transformations.
These are stories of spatial legitimacy and privilege.
The discourse on hierarchies of reconstruction that legibility, the legality of violence enacted through and against the urban fabric.
The events of dislocations and dispositions under the condition of occupation here.
The memory of past transposition and convergence and the premonition of the transformations
still to come are indicated in the singular condition of the ordinary tenements courtyard.
Violence targeting cities continues is enacted by denying the ordinary places and buildings there are singularity,
denying them consideration as architecture,
as objects and spaces for living, for their living, and positing them instead as generic objects in historical discourses.
Exposing the single moment of the captured aerial view.
The curious dwelling hidden in the courtyard carries radical dislocations and transformations already obstructing the city.
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.
Rather, it is the ordinary surfaces and places of dwelling, singular glances of chance,
spectators and objects of spatial temporal vulnerability that give testimonies that
require the kind of meticulous examination of the memorial debris demanded by Benyamin.
Over crashing squeaks, crushing ski at its northern edge, where she continues Cass Street intersects with the square's central axis benefactor Oscar.
The urban camera captures a formal composition of diagonals.
Each segment of the photographed space a distinct morphology of ruination, a completely obliterated, targeted section of the city,
a spot damaged traditional tenement block, an empty space cleared of rubble from the earlier bombardment and an imminent ruin is still intact.
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.
The puncture in the roof of the annexe of the palace of collateral targeted damage highlights the
precision of the violence enacted on the dome boarded space at the top section of the photograph,
the liquidated ghetto adjacent to the square.
The crisply drawn wall, uninterrupted by damage,
is now a redundant outline of the space clearly marked by the mutilation of its surface within its boundary.
The wall contains the city turned into a scarred plane, punctuated by sharp verticals of still standing fragments of facades.
And Barty was at a glance. The total destruction is registered as an unvarying brightness and variable intensity overexposure in the photograph.
The tragedy of that which had been and the foreshadowing of the will have been come to
a heightened visibility in the signs of the ordinary that are adjacent to the ghetto.
The damage tenement on the right, its front still marked with a signboard of the furniture store.
Meddler overlooks the vast space of a bleak playground on whose cleared surface traces of removed buildings are still visible.
Five swings are in use at the moment, and a group of school boys, their heads raised,
look up right into the camera at the lower edge of the at the launch of the image around shape.
A carousel is reading its reading predicated upon recalling Chatsworth mi wash washes poem Campo de Fiore on the left,
the water reservoir in front of the crushing ski palace,
a premonition of its futility in fighting the failure of a few months later a
pointless figure considering the scorched terrain nearby with its contiguity severed,
the annexe of the palace is now an absurd political share.
No longer connecting buildings across the square, it is a divider between the spaces it overlooks.
Still allowing passages into the void, its city to its north, pinned down in its position by the vertical puncture.
It is now a material witness to death and survival.
In the summer of 1944, a year after the liquidation of the ghetto, the building remains an immobilised onlooker.
It is still unable to reconcile the disjuncture of its split vision,
the impossibility of experiencing the simultaneously opposing directions of seeing in the now of this photograph.
This former court building remains a material witness to the wartime tragedy of its location, with a prospect across a continuous scar.
The views from one side of the building registered the physical construction of the racial division within the city,
marking the spaces as Jewish and Aryan, and the subsequent erasure of the part of that show designated and closed as Jewish Quarter.
It witness the city deployed as a tool of any relation of one third of its inhabitants
and its total destruction within the area marked as the space of the other.
The city will remain fractured ever since. Towards the square,
the bombing of the tenements in the Blitz of 1939 would be seen as would the weapons piled up high after
the surrender and the subsequent clearing of the roll into buildings for the makeshift playground.
The building witnessed the turning of the city into an instrument of occupation,
a massive process of relocations, dispossession, annexations and conversions that took place.
In order to claim spaces as Northfield, Deutscher and those designated for the others along currently discussed Street.
The lone tenement at the edge of the Palace Garden overlooks the field of destruction.
The building's sharp shadow, folding itself over the defensive wall, enters the space of the real memory of the ghetto.
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.
The tenement has been a witness to looking at witness to witnessing.
Now its shadow points to absent surfaces of past seeing it outlines the memory of being seen.
If seeing is visiting as we learn from Michel Serre, then an act of seeing demands coming forward, crossing roads, assuming positions,
but seeing also issues from immobility, from a fixed stair,
the denial of movement from disregarding the glance coming from the object being looked at,
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,
where the memories from before the city's forced segregation and those of the city's complicity in death and survival are located.
The sharp mark of the tenements crossing points and the sharp mark of the tenements
crossing points out that the overexposed space voided from the city is not empty.
On the bleak plains of ruination. Shadows index sudden presences in signs of human activity.
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,
piling up material against the wall along a fracture scar neatly stacked, sorted piles of objects of similar shapes lie prepared for collection.
The material of the liquidated ghetto is being segregated.
Sort it out. Is it for the reconstruction of the German cities?
For Albert's fierce plan on Sharp,
Pasha insists that damage transforms a building from an object with precise uses and meanings into a treasure trove of materiality,
into heaps of stuff and clouds of smoke that easily even necessarily serve as substantiation of violence.
Here, the designated area of separation first became an instrument of the dehumanisation in the time of the photograph,
still raw from the violence of destruction. It is being materialised through segregation.
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,
while the city within its boundary, its architecture, the space of living for the living would be confined to oblivion.
Its insight denied. In the last photograph that I will consider here.
The F.W. 189 gaining height and turning south is flying right above a small street.
It doesn't register anything worthy of close scrutiny.
It seems focussed on the rigid geometry of the National Museum and on the compositional diagonals of the image.
The axis of the photograph along Elliott stretching Amaya, then button back and of Strasser intersecting with novitiate.
Oh, sorry.
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.
Here beside the museum, the Communist Party headquarters will be built soon after the war, asserting a new spatial regime for the city.
The tenements along the street cleared to ensure visibility across the new parade grounds in the time of the photograph.
Small, north and narrow street.
Parallel to Alya Trichet, Gomera is still intact and only the houses along the near nearby foxhole reveal extensive war damage.
The rooftops missing floor plans exposed to scrutiny from above before the summer ends.
The rooftops of small enough will be similarly opened up by fires.
The aerial attack sharing the tenement at number 36 and reducing its annexe to a ruin will come later that year.
Inside the studio. Inside the studio.
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.
Now in a sudden moment of realisation, one rectangle of blocked light hinged on the blind wall.
Blind party wall becomes the point of singularity in the name of my reading.
It is a shadow of the absence of the House of the Missing stories above the studio space.
In recording the building's past presence, the photograph makes visible the present absence.
The shadow affirms the place's spatial memory, linking that then of the image with the material vulnerability of this site.
In the now of my looking, it becomes a punk film.
In Russia's sense, a tangle of indeterminacy is a point of tension between the known and the unknown.
It extends the notion, however, into the materiality of puncture, a point of impact, an index of loss where the unsold salt resides.
Well when she seeks offensiveness in art images, I'm tracking the insights of the surfaces viewed by the urban weapon in their indeterminacy.
These surfaces and vectors of looking and those of seeing, they cohere objects, directing movements, specifying positions and distances.
The frame places,
locating and affecting their viewing and their views through the shadows cast upon them surfaces mark time in singularities of contact,
points of impact. Memories come into view. Sudden moments of insight surface to attention.
These moments are marked by a vertiginous disquiet, a whirl of details,
a vortex of local histories, a vertigo of things that attention compels us to follow.
Vertigo, Mark Dorian notes, is not about the height or looking down, but a certain grounding, a sense of imminent fall.
It is dizziness, triggered by a sudden awareness of distance or proximity,
a sense of anxiety set off by changing the axis of viewing and sensing a pool of a spiralling force.
Vertigo is a surface condition of visibility, of transparency, not just looking through will,
but a sense of falling through the surface, breaking through the surface.
Tension of the now with a higher altitude, moving from a low oblique toward a high vertical.
The aerial photograph becomes thinner in surface detail and abstraction increases.
The unsettling gazes from the ground are no longer registered.
The sense of transparency heightens and some good recalled by the earlier described
glass like transparency of the aerial landscape viewed as a high vertical.
Antoine, since Saint-exupéry likened his looking through the glazed cockpit to examining objects through the glass case in a museum.
Reflecting on looking at the aerial image. Dorian points to the different directional mode of aerial views.
Each focussed on a specific interpretation of the visible.
For saint-exupéry the oblique view, the mode the pilot normally engages with was likened to a sense of coherence.
While the vertical view required for the task of a military observer was about, as Dorian writes,
the vertiginous itemisation of serious of objects in looking in the now of historical aerial photographs,
however, our modes of viewing negotiated differently.
In these images, the vertigo is set off by conflicting temporal dimensions of the views, the vertical for the topography of destruction,
patterns of death and survival, and the oblique in which the detailed texture of places comes to attention.
Benjamin sees memory as a stage, a place where images severed from their context arise into visibility in the name of understanding.
In his metaphor, the buried city simply a city of the past,
its debris accessible through an archaeological procedure of recovery whereby
the deposits are brought out as insights but no major trauma is registered.
What if, however, as is the case in my examination, the urban memory is that of the catastrophe,
of the piling ruin upon ruin witnessed by Benjamin's later figure.
That of the Angela's novels. What if the angel of History,
where both the witness and the instrument of destruction now blind and weighted down by the symbolic debris, as in Anselm Kiefer.
Angel. Angel of history, which coming to visibility not require a different procedure for the memory of urban trauma.
Dorian suggests a possible figure for such a city.
He finds her in a photograph of a child in Warsaw who, in the aftermath of the war,
is shown drawing her house on a blackboard poised on the edge of the vertiginous spiral of her chalk drawing,
depositing line upon line of troubled memories. The girl confronts him both with Hester and with a catastrophe beyond history.
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.
I should have known.
And that was very moving in politics to to this.
We're discussing today is Professor John Bank from the Department of Modern Literature at the University of Westminster.
His work is largely concerned with issues of place, landscape and politics,
and he has published widely on various aspects of photography, art and literature in relation to issues of visuality and militarisation.
He's the author of Dirty Wars, Landscapes, Power and Waste in Western American Literature,
and he's also the client writer of American Visual Cultures, published in 2005.
Thanks. I wonder if you could say something about the first image that you talked about,
because there was a kind of any chromatic opening which led us into the discussion,
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.
And you talk about finding this image in the studio.
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.
Mm hmm. Well, that that image was in a way, it allowed me to conceptualise the entire way.
I wanted to deal with them with the particular collection of images with which I was intrigued.
But I wasn't quite sure what to do with this, how to actually write about it.
I mean, there were a couple of studies of of of that work which were sort of largely descriptive.
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,
of war. So as if Warsaw was at the time not destroyed as it in 44, in July 44 it existed.
So, so so. So that and that and that moment actually of realisation.
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,
at the negative and and I mean actually looking at the glass negative is, is that is a very interesting experience.
It's quite moving I think in itself because when one actually touches an object which was right there in the moment of photographing,
that very negative was right there. And and the fact that that that negative was so brittle and I was looking at it,
I was actually holding it all that the glass over the stone floor of that of the studio.
And I had this sense of like sometimes we have with a very delicate object, a fear of falling.
And and there was so and so the brittleness was actually very physical in that way.
And and I was also interested in in how so.
So that was sort of this moment of of of realisation that I really wanted to focus on that felt relation to the ground.
So the aerial view as it is related to the ground and.
And when I went back to the photographs to the looked looked at those photographs,
what was most intriguing and sort of troubling and and and and interesting and interesting in a
troubling way was that you can actually see that the photographer could see people in much detail,
could see the gate of people, could see whether I mean, the woman is wearing a white or bright dress.
There is another woman nearby and she holds the hand of the man who walks with her.
And then he has his trench coat over his arm.
I mean, you see the gate, you see the way people move.
And and so that was really quite a quite, quite important for me to establish the relationship to the specific place.
Yes, I thought that was very striking the way that you you were reading these images kind of
against the grain of the kind of military that their original military reconnaissance uses.
And I wondered how how conscious you were that that was a deliberate act to reclaiming the images from the history.
They kind of come into it because presumably the original photographers in it were
not terribly interested in the fact that somebody was looking up the camera.
So you finding things out there that that they were. Not necessarily.
Yes, but but but the that particular collection is not really a like a proper military reconnaissance.
There are no past flight paths marked on the negatives.
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.
You cannot read the information that you normally do read from from from proper military photographs.
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,
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.
But but but in a way, that's what you see when you look at at his flight flight path.
I mean, there is nothing military about it.
I mean, he meanders over the over the park and then clearly he positions himself to take that particular street on very deliberate view,
which is I mean,
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,
those who would be considered historical fault for fault for a full length thought that I mean, for the Occupy.
You tell me what Yankee Park was one of the few.
So so there is a there is a static preoccupation.
I saw it in the way the images were taken and which were not sort of military preoccupations, you know,
although the ones with the shadows in could be construed as kind of from the aesthetic point, you're kind of wrong on that.
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,
we take our own shadow as a kind of a marker that we've been there, which is sort of interesting.
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.
So I could see his effect on on the city in a way I could see where he was touching the ground.
I think that's very important because that that the fact that the shadow is there means that the plane is fairly low.
But it also signals a kind of the kind of aggression that's latent in the images,
because there's a trace that it's marked on the ground by that by the kind of surveilling object,
which seems like the tracks negative to be this kind of moment of revelation, if you like,
that something is shown in the photograph, it tells you more about the the historical context than it first appears.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I was also I was interested the way that you kind of reading back into the images that,
like this will have been the place where certain acts of violence.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So that you could say something about your kind of sense of your own vibe, if you like.
Yeah. In relation to using these as anticipations of new events.
Well, the anticipation is mainly seen in the moment of I mean,
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.
So it's it's a summer and turn.
And the the sort of the final destruction of the city begun first of on the 1st of August.
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.
So this is sort of a pre destruction moment and time.
And it's and the way that the images were read also in the album,
there was a there was a fascination with with this fact that this is a preserved war.
So just before all this destruction. So this moment of of I mean, this is how how the the album how those those images,
when they were found, they were presented that this is sort of just before the war so disappeared.
And there was. So there was something very is the most something that you read into the image that that
that the the will have been would be would be the you kind of resist the glass then you.
Because as you say, it's a long, protracted forensic.
Yes. Archaeological unpacking of shadows traces.
Yes. Yes. And and I guess that's something which which is I mean,
it's really interesting that the how how much looking is packed into the brief description I have of each of the images,
because, I mean, I pored over those images with a magnifying glass as well as I could view them because,
I mean, they they are a phenomena of phenomenal resolution.
I mean, the nitrate images are incredible. And so so the resolution is incredible.
And and they could be viewed at photo artwork in.
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.
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,
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?
And. And then, you know, there were those moments when, for example, on this this image,
this photograph looks entirely still like and I didn't see any any any any person, anybody in the.
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.
And there was something really quite interesting because there is this white spot, which is a.
Who is this white spot right here?
And I sort of looked at it and I thought these were flower pots.
I mean, there are some flowering bushes in in a couple of places.
And then I thought these were flower pots. And I said, ignored this spot.
Couldn't see any any any movement anywhere.
And then I described it and just before the French version of that of the of the of the of the essay was published.
And as I was struggling with a translation because I was very particular about the way that I wanted to describe things.
I think I have it further down. So. Some.
I've made. Okay. Okay.
So and then with horror, I actually discovered that these were not flower parts.
I mean, horror, meaning?
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.
I really wanted to be just a plain description of what's happening.
And there is a group of children you could see them.
Around the bench. So so there was and there was something really incredible about this kind of discovery that there is you know,
that that as incredible as the discovery in the ghetto of of people lifting doing something.
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,
was really quite because that that kind of flies in the face of the kind of abstracting some
function of the area know that you can locate kind of identifiable use actions and events.
Yes.
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.
I mean, this is this is just the material.
And and ruins are still filled with human remains.
And and that's very rarely talked about.
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.
And so so I wanted to sort of to capture that.
And in in also discuss very often we.
What what I see at least, is that that it's the it's the city.
It's the material of the city which sort of forms this main preoccupation.
So the buildings and especially the iconic buildings or historical buildings or the churches
and the palaces and and and I and I was small and I sort of remain more interested in,
in the ruins of the places of living, ruins of homes, ruins of of, I mean, lives, as well as as dwellings.
Now, I thought it interesting that you said that that you didn't want to interpret the images, but to describe them.
So would you say that your kind of active, prolonged looking is a form of kind of belated witnessing of another,
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.
Mm hmm. Which is which? Which does have a kind of poetic quality to it,
which seems quite so self-conscious in the way that the reader is led through these sequence of acts, finding and putting together.
And the text that you read is a is a kind of text which is a is a kind of piecing together well,
the kind of the series of deliberations, which are also joined together through through your active of in these documents.
Yes. Yes. And it's just and it's very I mean, that's something which I'm actually struggling with in a way.
Because because I mean, even when I'm reading,
I'm very self-conscious when I'm reading the text because the the text sort of wants to be read poetically.
And I'm in a kind of lingering way and and with certain pathos and and I'm sort of resisting it.
And then what comes out is a bit of more fragmented reading because I'm becoming really self conscious of, of it.
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,
I mean, there was a of an a comment or a reaction on the poetic aspect of the of the.
Of of of of of of of the text. And and I think in some cases,
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.
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.
And I find that kind of fascinating that the form of writing would maybe be in a way suspect if.
In some ways, I suspect of of of sort of, um.
Maybe not. You know, if politic then perhaps not objective then non scholarly, which is sort of interesting as well.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.