Photography as urban narrative

Questioning whether we think as much about how we write as to what we write, I undertook recently a more rigorous reflection on what I saw as an exercise in ‘writing the city into the urban’. As I encountered the risk of writing the city out of the urban, I sought to write the city (creatively) back into the (critical) urban. It involved a gesture where photographic images of the city offered new meanings to the textual abstraction of the urban. It is no small act, nor an innocent one. It is also a longstanding one in the representational practices of writing the city. The simple task of juxtaposing photographs with a text while offering new ingenious forms of ‘writing’, opens up questions of not only how these images could very well question the validity of the text but also how photography’s ability to generate an archive of the (city’s) present draws attention to its own ethnographic (im)possibilities and epistemological crisis.