Documenting city flows: Wires

This visual ethnography follows the flows of the city. Wires bring dwellers together but they also play an important role in limiting access to the city. They make it impossible for our homes to appear as self-contained bodies, as they connect across boulevards, courtyards, or through the underground with other urban forms. They also tie our present homes to past ones, allowing for different temporalities to coexist in our homes (just think about the role of telephone wires in keeping together immigrant families). Some wires surge toward the sky, other remain bounded midway by electricity poles, rooftops, or balconies. The arches of wires sometimes seem to bring houses closer to one another, thus binding the cityscape more tightly together. In other cases, wires seem to stretch the fabric of the city to its limits, imposing additional material and symbolic distances on city dwellers.

When I look at photographs, even those I take, I keep in mind Pierre Bourdieu’s word of advice for sociologists who “read” photographs. He noted that photography always portrays and betrays the embodied dispositions of the person holding the camera.[1] Photographs are tools for producing the city and not only for documenting it. The photographs I included in this visual ethnographic project are not mere representations of city flows. They also reveal particular ways of cataloguing, mapping, and imagining cities and our positions within them. The photographed wires thus reveal as much as they obscure about everyday city life. This project nonetheless attempts to remind us that our home in the city is an always-changing artifact that is collaboratively produced by human and nonhuman bodies.

Notes on photographs: 1. Sunnyside, New York City, November 2018; 2. Sunnyside, New York City, September 2017; 3. Seattle, May 2019; 4 and 5. Buenos Aires, September 2017; 6. Midwest, United States, March 2019; 7. Lima, January 2018; 8. New Orleans, December 2018; 9. Paterson, New Jersey, April 2018; 10. Midwest, United States, March 2019; 11. New Orleans, December 2018; 12. Pitesti, Romania, July 2019; 13. Jackson Heights, New York City, November 2018. Source: Olimpia Mosteanu.

References:
[1] Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).