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FrancoAngeli Journals

Papers

No. 1 (2023)

Images and the city: photography and video as critical devices

  • Francesca Governa
  • Samuele Pellecchia
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/rgioa1-2023oa15436
Submitted
febbraio 15, 2023
Published
2023-03-08

Abstract

How can we use images to research, and think? How can we use them to transform urban knowledge, and what input can visual language provide to foster a critical urban knowledge, open new interpretations, shift our gaze and our vision of things? The article reflects on these questions by critically reconstructing the close relationship between images and the city, questioning how the videophotographic representation of the city dialogues with changing ways of thinking, conceptualizing, and knowing the urban, then discusses whether and how producing photographs and videos, and thus studying urban space through the camera and re-watching the photographed and filmed urban space, is a way to affirm and practice a critical urban approach. Presenting some examples of urban research that have produced images (photographs and videos), the article focuses on the potential of visual language in urban research with the aim to explore the possibilities of a more-than-textual research that, recognizing the theoretical and interpretive bearing of images, uses photographs and videos as critical devices to overcome closures, limitations, and aporias of mainstream urban visions and build a dialogue, in many ways all to be imagined, between critical visual methodologies and critical urban theory.

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