90 Views
Inter-area/Border Crossing
Organized Panel Session
In the booming field of infrastructure studies, infrastructure has been framed as a provocative site of inquiry for its material vanishings: infrastructures are hidden, operating behind the scenes, and, therefore, taken for granted. In this perspective, the smooth operation of infrastructure in the “developed” city constitutes its invisibility. However, as scholars of the Global South and peripheral urbanization have shown, infrastructures are also sites of contestation, environment making, and political action. Infrastructures are, therefore, emphatically visible.
This paper examines the visualization of infrastructure through the medium of photography as a starting point for considering potential outcomes of what Brian Larkin calls the poetic mode of infrastructure. What happens when infrastructure is detached from its original function via its representation in photographs, or loosed from its material context in the space of the art gallery? How can infrastructure-as-image come to represent a population, create new urban imaginaries, or define alternate ways of being in the world? I take the Japanese photographer Miyamoto Ryūji’s representations of infrastructure from the notorious Hong Kong slum, Kowloon Walled City, as a case study to show how entrenched biological metaphors for infrastructure make its material compositions amenable to narratives of human resilience, creativity, and agency. The historical and visual analysis of Miyamoto’s prolific photographs of Kowloon in the final years before its demolition reveals how the visual affect of infrastructure operates on diverse actors who continue to speak for the Walled City’s former population and condition its existence.
Carrie Cushman
Wellesley College