The link between photography and the modern city is well established. In the mid-19th century this developing technology was perfectly suited to capture turbo-charged urban growth as it happened, providing a new way of seeing emerging global metropolises.
“Photography not only depicted these wholly novel sorts of environments,” says Meredith More, a curator at the V&A Dundee. “It became an expression in itself of their modernity and complexity. The way people began to imagine and to inhabit their cities was profoundly influenced by the way they were photographed.”
A forthcoming V&A Dundee exhibition, Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World, explores this relationship. The centrepiece is a new work by the Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino. Late last summer Nishino spent six weeks in Dundee walking the streets, meeting people, visiting community groups and businesses and taking photographs of anything that caught his eye: football matches, gulls, car parks, the botanic garden, a hairdresser, the sky, the river. Twenty thousand images later he returned to his studio in Shizuoka, Japan, where he began to make some sense of it all.
The resulting work is a vast diorama map, more than five metres wide, made up of thousands of tiny individual images assembled by hand into a personalised collage of his trip. From a distance it acts as a topographically accurate map – there’s the River Tay, the bridges, the hills and so on – but go a little closer and there is the built environment with its historic and modern architecture; closer still there are people and birds and the delightful little details that emerged from his chance encounters.
“I had no expectations – I only knew that it was a regional city in Scotland, and that it had the V&A Museum,” says Nishino. “If you look at a city from a bird’s eye view, it will just flow by you. But by walking with local people you gain more layers of perspective. I wanted to create a work that captures the landscape from high and low. I wanted multiple points of view.”
Nishino has previously made diorama maps of other cities including Tokyo, London, San Francisco and New Delhi. This latest work will be presented alongside stellar historic images from the V&A’s photographic holdings – Thomas Annan’s 19th-century Glasgow, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 20th-century Paris and so on – as well as more modern work and sections on aerial photography and recently made 3D scans of Ukrainian heritage sites under threat from the Russian invasion.
“Dundee was the smallest city I have worked in, but the final result was bigger than the other cities,” he says. “That was because I focused more on the people and events. The process of the work includes the physicality of walking and moving, as well as the photographic element. And while my work reflects the perspectives of my own travels, it is through the filter of the people who live there.”
Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World is at V&A Dundee from 29 March.
Slice of life: four details from Sohei Nishino’s Dundee diorama
The football grounds
Dundee’s two football stadiums are separated by about 185 metres. “From my time in the city I had the impression that the local people were relatively shy and calm,” says Nishino. “But the intensity of a match was truly amazing. The shouting and expressions on their faces were 180 degrees different from what I had previously seen.”
People playing bowls
“When I first visited Dundee I was impressed by elderly people gathering at bingo and was disappointed that I couldn’t take photos of them. Then I found the bowls green. It could not be seen from the outside and it felt like a sacred space. But no matter how long I looked, I never could figure out the rules.”
The V&A and the river
“I started with the V&A when I began pasting the photos. I felt that the waterfront project and the establishment of the museum were important for the development of the city, and also for its future. So I rented a boat and took pictures from the river. I wanted to preserve the impression of the city floating on the river as I had seen when driving across the bridge.”
The McManus
The McManus, Dundee’s art gallery and museum, is geographically and culturally at the heart of the city. “I passed it every day and it became symbolic for me,” says Nishino. ”From it I could see a school, a pub, a cemetery, a historic jute factory and a casino, all in one magical space. And also the publishers DC Thomson, home of the Beano comic.”
