have a different quality depending on where we are looking and listening. Yet we believe there is just one world, one identity that provides those multiple profiles. So the sound in different vignettes must accord with each other and with what we see. That is our working presupposition.
More generally, video tomography makes us rather more acutely aware of the phenomenology of perception and understanding, since it provides for greater complexities in those acts of finding identities and filling in their detail than are demanded by multiple still photographs or even multiple sound recordings of a place or type or process. What is remarkable is that often we are able to figure out what is going on through such documentation and get a fulfilling sense of the richness of the city. It is not that greater detail solves the problems of documentation; rather, it demonstrates further our ability to figure out the world, fulfilling its possibilities: an imaginative cinematography.
Tomography, with its multiple images and aspectival variations, is the archetype of what the phenomenological philosopher teaches us about unity in multiplicity (again, “identity in a manifold presentation of profiles”). We start out, always, with some sense of what we are seeing—in space, in time, and in type. The multiplicity of aspects allows us to fill in that notion, satisfying or disappointing our expectations.
Seeing Wide-Angle Deeply
The cameras and wide-angle lenses I use for still photography, having 70–85 degree horizontal angles of view, allow me to be at a distance a bit less than the height or width of a storefront’s facade.22 That is, I am still on the sidewalk or just in the street, and yet I can incorporate into my photograph the almost-square facade of a single store’s width and height, including the sign above the front window. Everything is in the frame. My viewfinder has a bubble level in it or an alignment grid, so I can be sure that I am not tilting the camera up or down, or to the left or the right—so squares remain square in the image.
Nor am I distant from people at work on the shop floor or at a worship service, for I am quite close to the first rank of these people in front of my camera. Often in these situations I have carefully pushed my wideangle snout into their work space or worship space, using an unobtrusive camera, no flash or tripod, and moving quickly but respectfully.
Moreover, I am close enough so that little is in the way that might occlude the facade or the work site—although a large piece of machinery, or a tree, or a parked car or truck may be unavoidable. (The sun may be coming up over the roof of the building, or the indoor lighting might be aimed at my lens, and then I must photograph obliquely, rather than frontally, to avoid lens flare.)
For an individual facade, not much of the surrounding environment is in view—except for the sidewalk, the cars, the street furniture, and the walls of adjacent buildings. The facade is just there, in front of me—a particular facticity. Yet if I photograph facades, going down a street one building after the next, each image overlapping the adjacent one, say on a strip of 35 mm film, each facade is now seen in context.23
For indoor landscapes of industrial sites, even though I am close in, the depth of the scene incorporated by the wide-angle lens brings tantalizing detail into view.24 The image has enormous reserves of quality and detail—the lenses are that good.25
What is striking is how much is left in within the image, what is carved in by the frame lines of the negative or the sensor, including things in the background. You are forced to be right there rather than distant. Moreover, whatever occludes your ostensible subject, that in-front-of stuff, such as a parked car, is significant in itself—and may someday be what you are really interested in, much as you might be interested in what is in the background, what is not focused on. Getting closer, some of the once-occluding objects are behind you.
To have a large angle of view means that you see much more of the objects you are photographing. More of an object’s shape and the range of its shading will be part of the image. The tonality will be more varied. The continuity of surfaces and the presences of edges and bends and cracks (the shapes of things) are more fully given, so that surfaces, edges, and bends are not merely local facts but are global geometric and tonal facts: the shapes of things, what they look like when seen.
For the most part, these sites were not meant to be photographed, although they are readily accessible. These are sites meant to be lived in, worked in, worshipped in, in the matter of course seen but not imaged. I am not a photographer but just an “old man with a camera,” as I was once described by a metalworker at a factory. Or, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir put it, “My aim was to give the impression that I was carrying a camera and microphone in my pocket and recording whatever came my way, regardless of its comparative importance.”26 I am interested in the world, not the photograph, not “the shot,” not the archive of photographs as artworks. The photographs make it possible to see what is there in front of your eyes, now unavoidably so.27
The material was there for anyone to see, but it required fieldwork to find enough of it so that it could be taken to be a phenomenon, systematic work so that what I saw was not taken to be idiosyncratic, and reflection to place what I discovered in a larger scholarly context. So discoveries become objective phenomena.
To do this sort of fieldwork one must have extensive examples of the phenomenon of concern. Once you can provide those examples to others, they might well be convinced of the reality of the phenomenon and then be quite comfortable with just a few examples. But fifty or five hundred examples are the most effective inoculation against skeptics.28 It helps to be able to provide rich overlapping theoretical insights from various disciplines, so that what is perhaps peculiar or unnoticed is now seen as indicative of a much larger range of facts and situations. In addition you must show that what you have found is not just a chance occurrence—numbers help, but maps of spatial distributions and other such will also help. Finally, you will need good taste or good fortune in your discoveries, for some ubiquitous phenomena may not be as illuminating as are others.
In order to make such discoveries, your fieldwork has to be relatively unencumbered by looking for something else. You have to put in the time and effort, and you will almost surely do most of your work on foot (or, as in some of my work, from a helicopter) or be present to actual working people (in a hospital or in a factory).
You have to be able to tell a story about what you have found that is rich in its connections with what everyone would seem to know. You will have succeeded if people start noticing the phenomenon you have identified and think it is obvious—when, before they saw your work, they saw nothing of interest. In the natural sciences, such discoveries have always been of very great import. In the social sciences, we sometimes forget the importance of phenomena, subjugating them to theory and theory testing. Our sensory world cries for identifiable phenomena. The phenomena or processes or objects or places become identities that are seen to provide for that manifold presentation of profiles or aspects. In Chapters 2 through 5 I try to exemplify wide-angle and deep documentation, showing how the world produces what we see.
Lee Friedlander’s City
Whether through images of monuments in the middle of cities or images of parking lots on parcels eventually to be developed, the photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) has shown us how our cities are ironic and planned and layered and juxtaposed and discordant. A typical Friedlander photograph will show a chain-link fence up front, a high-rise office tower in the distant background, both in sharp focus—in between those two a concrete block wall separating two parking lots, and in the near foreground Friedlander’s shadow.29
Friedlander’s point of view is rarely plan, axonometric, or frontal. Rather, for example, he wonders, what does the world look like to a baby in a carriage, while the baby is on her back? He finds those most available of places to stand, the parking lots and the backyards and the sidewalks, and then photographs what is in front of him, layered by all the stuff in between. Again, there is enough depth of field for all to be in focus. The wide-angle lens of his camera is superb to the edges, so everything has more than enough definition.
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