Cities of ambition

MOST of us today live in cities, especially in a country such as Australia where the population is almost absurdly concentrated in a few urban agglomerations.

MOST of us today live in cities, especially in a country such as Australia where the population is almost absurdly concentrated in a few urban agglomerations.

The very word civilisation comes from the idea of living in cities, as opposed to villages or small tribal groups.

Almost since the origin of cities, their residents have felt themselves to be more refined than the people who live in the country: city people are urbane as well as urban; country people are not only rural but rustic. At the same time, the longing to escape the density and stress of city life for the peace of the country and closeness to nature is almost as old as urbanisation -- at any rate it is a persistent theme in Roman literature.

Cities arise from an unpredictable combination of design and organic growth. Only new ones are wholly planned from the beginning, and the result is often rather sterile; most great cities have evolved more or less spontaneously, at a crossroads of trade or in a position that can be defended from attack, around a number of principal buildings and spaces according to the nature of the society. From time to time a king or governor -- more rarely a democratically elected authority -- will open a new thoroughfare or create new squares and vistas within the city. The shape of Paris is the result of many dramatic city-planning interventions of this kind.

Cities end up being, to some extent, the image of the people who live in them: their ethos, way of life and even the political culture that does or does not allow for large-scale reshaping of the urban fabric. They are like the shells that sea molluscs grow around themselves, with their varied shapes and patterns. The character of great cities is one of the most intriguing things about them, and usually that character is manifested as much in the layout of space and the relations of roads and squares as in the style of its public buildings, monuments and residences.

Luminous Cities, as an exhibition of photographs of the urban environment, is a striking reminder how very different the look and texture of different cities can be. The older pictures in this exhibition are early photographs of ancient cities and ruins; here the construction is largely of stone, and weathered natural materials are coincidentally registered in the gentler tones of mid-19th-century photography.

Not surprisingly, some of the earliest pictures are of Rome, for so long not merely a city but the city, even in its ruined and depopulated state towering over western Europe -- how great Rome was, as a famous Latin saying put it, its very ruins attest.

Rome had remained the centre of the church, and as it was rebuilt in the Renaissance and baroque periods it once again became the capital of Western civilisation; in the 18th century it was the centre of the Grand Tour and when the camera was invented it was naturally one of the first places to be documented with the new technology. Both ancient and baroque Rome are captured in a picture by Robert Macpherson (c.1860) showing Trajan's column and part of his forum with the two domed churches of Santa Maria di Loreto and the Santissimo Nome di Maria in the background.

In contrast, there is an evocative picture of an empty street in Pompeii by an unknown photographer of the same period. Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD79, had been forgotten until its excavation in the second half of the 18th century. The view we see here includes neither grand ancient monuments nor great edifices of later ages but simply the skeleton of an everyday world, stripped of its human animation.

Greece had also been virtually unknown, locked away in the Ottoman Empire, until the late 18th century, a period that represented the beginning of modern archeology. With the first publications of its antiquities, and especially after the Greek war of liberation from Turkish rule, it became a new focus of interest. After centuries of Ottoman rule, Athens was no longer a city, merely a village huddling around the foot of the Acropolis. Thucydides had predicted that if ever Athens and its rival Sparta should fall into ruins, future generations would overestimate the wealth and power of the former and underestimate those of the latter because Athens had spent so much on public buildings. And indeed William Stillman's picture of the caryatids of the Erechtheum evokes a grandeur, confidence and grace that modern Athens has never regained.

Of the great modern cities, London and Paris stand out as subjects of early photographers. Edouard Baldus's picture of work at the Louvre around 1855 evokes the grandeur of the palace, itself the result of successive building campaigns from the Renaissance to the 17th century and the age of Napoleon, and continued under the reign of his nephew, Napoleon III, whose engineer, Haussmann, carved the great boulevards out of the urban fabric of the city during the same period.

If Baldus's photograph speaks of the kind of authoritarian central planning that has given Paris its grand axes, symmetries and vistas, Eugene Atget's Corner of rue Valette (1925) contrasts the organic quality of a part of the old city spared by the extensive replanning with the vast, neo-classical structure of the Pantheon, built in 1758-90 and representing the wilful imposition of order and design. Seen through the mist of an early spring morning, Atget specifies in the title that the picture was taken on a morning in March -- the huge monument has a slightly unreal, dreamlike quality compared with the everyday world of the old houses.

All the photographs discussed so far include some of those buildings that help to give great cities their distinctive appearance and character. In the case of London there is a fascinating if fortuitous example of the way certain structures become part of the visual signature of a city. In Henry Hart's Westminster Bridge, dated in the exhibition between 1847 and 1857, we may be struck by a faint silhouette in the background fog, and slightly surprised to realise it is the tower of Big Ben.

Today, Big Ben is one of the most recognisable signs of the city of London. But at the time this photograph was taken, it was barely finished. The old Parliament House buildings had been destroyed in the fire of 1834, recorded by Turner, and the immense new complex, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, was erected between 1840 and the 1860s. The tower was actually finished in 1858, so Hart's picture must belong to the end of the date range assigned here; appropriately, he shows it materialising, as an image gradually emerges on photographic paper in the developing bath, taking shape before our eyes.

A slightly later photograph shows the whole new building with Westminster Cathedral in the background, and a few years afterwards the profile of Big Ben, by now a distinctive symbol of London, would be celebrated in Monet's paintings of the Thames.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was New York that came to epitomise the modern city. Alfred Stieglitz's great photograph of the ferries in Manhattan was taken in 1910 and is a prescient image of the city of skyscrapers -- or, as he titled the picture, the City of Ambition. The idea of New York was thus already clear 100 years ago, although many more and yet taller towers would be raised in the ensuing period.

Even earlier, Edward Steichen's 1905 picture of the Flatiron, built three years previously, contrasts this massive expression of commercial will -- like the Pantheon reduced to a misty silhouette in the background -- with the black foreground interlacing of bare winter branches evoking the cyclical life of nature. As New York grew, photographers discovered the exhilarating energy of the new city was inseparable from its inhumane and alienating density: they began to look at the city from the tops of buildings and to discover a world of man-made mountains and chasms. Paul Haviland's 1914 New York at Night looks down on a dark world divided by the valley of light represented by a great roadway. Berenice Abbott, from a higher vantage point, and in 1932, surveys countless apartment windows in a world that, given her angle of vision, has no end and no horizon.

Formally, the photographs of modern cities tend to use starker tonal contrasts to express the new environment of concrete and glass, harsher and more impersonal than stone, brick, tiles and slate.

But high contrast can also be employed -- especially with the help of wet weather, which is also the friend of painters of cityscapes -- to turn inert masonry into luminous, reflective surfaces. The optical properties of wet urban surfaces are especially well exploited in Bill Brandt's Rainswept Roofs (1934) and A Snicket in Halifax (1937), which turn bleak industrial habitats into crisp tonal patterns.

AT the NGV Federation Square site, meanwhile, a second photographic exhibition, Stormy Weather, surveys the complementary theme of landscape in contemporary photography. Perhaps the first thing we notice about the photographers in this show is their reluctance to approach nature through the formats and language of landscape painting, or their variants, adopted by the early pictorialist school of photographers. There is some justification for this: photography cannot transform nature with the depth and comprehensive poetic artifice of which painting is capable, and making photographs in emulation of painting is asking for invidious comparisons.

This is why the photographers have chosen various other approaches, attempting quite reasonably to do things that photographs can do and that painting cannot. Thus Richard Woldendorp takes aerial views of salt pans and gorges and other features which, both in form and colour, compose utterly strange and unfamiliar patterns. Harry Nankin, in contrast, produces photograms with fern fronds and other materials, including random elements that intrude because they are made on the forest floor at night.

Nici Cumpston comes closer to a traditional landscape format but renders the images artificial through the use of watercolours and pencils. Rosemary Laing adopts a more conceptual approach, setting pieces of mass-produced furniture, camouflaged in red, into vast outback panoramas. There are other devices that are used with greater or lesser success, but on the whole, the comparison of the two exhibitions suggests photography is better at representing the city than the natural environment. One picture that really stays in the mind is John O'Neill's black and white panorama of skeletal trunks and regenerating grass trees after a bush fire; here, the complexity of the organic world is stripped back to a dramatic tonal pattern that is perfectly suited to a medium founded on the play of lights and darks.