Photographing The End: The Skyline As Necropolis

What perfect equilibrium. Stability. Certainty. What perfect equanimity. These are some of the qualities one may see when he or she looks at a photograph of a city skyline. Or, one may see a massing of buildings, a tour de force of architecture. Or one may see the essence of New York City. Or one might see death biding his time.

Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography (1981), writes, "A specific photograph is, in effect, never distinguished from its referent (what it represents) …" In this paper, I will look at this particular subset of urban photography to see what is represented and also what is concealed.

The most notable aspect of skyline photography is distance. From the photographer's point of view, the greater the distance between the camera and its subject, the more dramatic the photograph will appear—the greatest number of buildings, the highest degree of congestion. From the "spectator's" (to borrow another of Barthes' terms) perspective, distance ensures the maximum experience of tension, rising from the picture's frame.

One always views a skyline from a "safe" distance. Safe, in this context, means that one is invited to experience the thrill of the city without either identifying with it—with its fate—or exposing oneself to the danger inherent in the place itself.

The skyline is ultimately seen as a document; often acquired as a souvenir. It is an image one can and does send home to mother. The skyline, like every photograph, is by design and nature incomplete. As we saw above, we are obliged to provide its meaning.

A conventional reading of a skyline is concerned with the surface—the physical attributes of a city at a particular time. While aspects of history, architecture or city planning may dominate one's immediate impressions, these are not of much interest to me. What concerns me is the utopian vision inherent in this genre. Its boosterism. Its ideology of immortality.

Skyline photography not only suggests a glorious past and a vibrant present, but also a promise of a brilliant future—a world beyond the reach of death. What's more, these photographs implicate us in this utopian vision of urban life.

There are many ways to photograph the City. The most popular include portraits of its inhabitants: Men and women captured either as individuals or in groups, in the course of the everyday. Men and women as archetypes or "characters." This distillation of place to the life of its inhabitants confirms the human presence at the heart of these great, and frequently shifting, piles of stone, steel and brick.

Up to this moment I have referred to the "city" in the general sense of the word, but I will, from this point on, be referring to New York City in particular. Whatever it is that photographers capture in a skyline, they do not capture the City. One can imagine from street photography the sounds of the City, its reverberations, its perpetual expansions and contractions. In contrast, almost every skyline suggests a depopulated city. A dead city. A Necropolis.

The living City represented by the street photographers—from Stieglitz and Steichen, Hine and Weegee (Arthur Fellig), to Bourke-White, Abbott, Frank and Klein—gave us our image of the modern City. Through their work we not only make sense of the place, but also find the words and emotions to express our experience of it.

Changes to the City's skyline are understood as minor, seen more as a matter of style than substance. This is because while individual buildings are themselves discontinuous, the skyline is a blending, a fusion of many individuals, into what Bataille might call a single and continuous mode of existence. In this way, additions and subtractions are relatively unimportant, an almost impersonal, certainly unconscious, accumulation.

The fact is, Times Square is the once and future Times Square. The Empire State Building remains the epitome of the skyscraper regardless of what is raised in Shanghai or Dubai, or over the footprint of the former World Trade Center. The skyline is Manhattan and all that it suggests, reveals and, most importantly, conceals.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes identifies two fundamental themes in a photograph: the studium and the punctum. The former, as I understand it, refers to those elements in the picture that relate to its cultural or shared meaning. The punctum, which Barthes defines as having the power to "disturb the studium," is far less objective. As Margaret Olin noted, "the punctum is always personal to the viewer and often a detail."

When I first saw this image on a postcard, the Twin Towers were still balanced, stable, certain. But there was something in the photograph that, as Barthes described it, "pricked" me. What pricked me was a deceptive and illusory stillness and quiet. This sensation, which punctured the field, was my punctum.

This photograph may once have offered a lovely, untroubled, representation of the City's southern skyline; but as we're all now aware, it is no longer representative. In the years since this photograph was taken, events have made the photographer's original intent entirely beside the point.

New York is now a besieged City, but skyline photography continues to maintain the illusion that we are invulnerable. Ultimately, the skyline photograph is a symbol for our individual and collective wish for immortality. However, to my mind, the irony of this kind of photography, this kind of symbol, is the ways in which it represents the world's most vital City—not as a vivid reality but as a place devoid of life. The City the skyline captures—still, eerie, passive—is more a necropolis than a thriving metropolis.