The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Philip Tabor
7.7 | (facing page) Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (c) 1994, International Center of Photography,
New York, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox.
serene, objective, and distanced from our fellows. 27 With what pleasure we
ride elevators to gaze down on the city and exclaim how inhuman, like ants,
seem the pedestrians and cars in the canyons beneath.
The banks of monitors showing arterial flows and congestions in
the TV traffic flash, the bird’s-eye glide above a desert war, afford us the
same glimpse of godlike, invulnerable serenity. Above the fray, the philosophical
spy in the sky.
THE KEYHOLE
From spy in the sky to fly on the wall. The videocam is a keyhole, projecting
us into intimacy with a world from which we are otherwise excluded, a
surrogate life more vivid and immediate than our own. Supposedly nonfictional
TV documentaries that eavesdrop at length on a family, firm, or public
service proved more gripping than fictional soaps. This fascination was
sometimes attributable to a dramatic narrative, but more often it was just
the thrill of banal witness: to find we are all the same under the skin.
Fictional dramas, like NYPD Blue, learned to mimic the technical
artifacts of espionage: overlapping inconsequential dialogue, handheld
wobble, spectral lens dazzle, close focus, artless camera angles. “We are witnessing
the end of perspective and panoptic space . . . and hence the very abolition
of the spectacular,” writes a celebrated commentator, “the dissolution of
TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV.” 28
THE GUN
The videocam is, God knows, a gun—handheld and stealth-black like a pistol,
shoulder-mounted like a bazooka, or turreted. Mike Davis, sketching
the “scanscape” of central Los Angeles, catches this isomorphism: “The occasional
appearance of a destitute street nomad . . . in front of the Museum
of Contemporary Art sets off a quiet panic; video cameras turn on their
mounts and security guards adjust their belts.” 29 The residents of major
cities fear that urban space is being increasingly militarized by both sides of
the law. But fear is mixed with perverse relish for that warlike tension that
supposedly sharpens cities’ “creative edge.” What the patrol car’s siren does
for New York, the swiveling lens does for Los Angeles. We feel alert, excited:
our designer glasses develop crosshair sights.