Introduction
The sociologist George Simmel once wrote that the attraction of secrecy is that it magnifies reality. Secrecy, he suggests,
shapes our sense of the world as split between a visible exterior and an invisible depth. This sense of an invisible depth helps to shape imaginative renderings of city life within popular culture. Innumerable popular cultural texts work to cast the city as a place of secrecy, of lurid behaviours described or evoked. In crime fiction, and in the periodical press devoted to scandal and to the
fait divers, the potential meaningfulness of urban space is magnified, made richer.
In the elaboration by several writers and artistic movements of what
Pierre Mac Orlan, in the 1920s and 1930s, called a
social fantastic
, the city was re-enchanted, re-envisioned as a place of mysterious spaces and elusive histories. Serialized crime novels, crime-oriented newspapers and the photojournalism of metropolitan daily newspapers produced a sense of the city as riddled with places which escape order (its dark corners and hideaways) and with its own, invisible forms of order (its networks of conspiracy and demi-mondes of eccentric behavior.)
The sense of the city as a place of secrecy has much to do with the journalistic and fictional forms which have grown up with the city. One tradition in the history of urban journalism
will stress the role of the newspaper or periodical in providing an ordered sense of the complex diversities of urban life. From McLuhan’s notion that each day’s new
New York Times organized one's passage through city life, tthrough James Donald’s claims about the pedagogical role of the urban press, to Hegel’s sense of the morning newspaper as a ritualized, collective prayer-- through all of these, the press is seen to bring an order to the itineraries of urban life. Against this, the popular culture of the
fait divers and the crime-oriented press may be said to reassert
those dimensions of urban life which resist this clarity and order. Robin Walz’ term
pulp surrealism is, perhaps, useful in designating a new experience of visual culture
which becomes common with the 20th century -- an experience of those cultural forms which take shape when the aesthetics of lighting and electrification converge with technologies for the cheap reproduction of images within the popular press. As Alan Tractenberg suggests, writing of city photography, “the urban place has now become a showplace of opportunities for visual experience, for the experience especially of tints and tones, of atmospheric effects.”
This site collects images of those publications, produced in
Toronto, Montreal, New York City and elsewhere, which participate in
this experience of "atmospheric effects." While the locations
of the stories offered here are often non-urban, the magazines
themselves are part of a culture of sensation we may consider
distinctly metropolitan. These galleries are being
expanded on an ongoing basis.
Will
Straw |
