Week 13: Sze Tsung Leong

Sze Tsung Leong

Alameda, México D.F., 2009

Sze Tsung Leong is an American and British photographer who was born in Mexico City, and spent time growing up in all three areas. Leong has three different bodies of work, Cities, Horizons, and History Images, that speak to the image of the city and "Cities in Crisis." In the body of work Cities,which Leong began in 2002, he photographs numerous cities around the world, from medieval towns to more recently constructed urban areas. Although each individual city is quite diverse, Leong stays consistent with his approach to photographing each city, by keeping the point of view, the compositions, and the immense detail of the photograph similar. The height that Leong chose to take the photographs at depicts not only the topology of the city but also the urban planning and layout of the city. There is a quality of the birds eye view to Leong's Cities photographs that allow for such an expansive view, but then the way he places the camera you are allowed to see in the foreground ground a closer detailed look of the city, where you can see cars on the streets and smaller details that you would normally not see from the birds eye view. One of the other qualities of each city that comes through in these photographs is how many cities have a color palette to them.

Xiasha Village, Futian District, Shenzhen, 2008

Malasaña, Madrid, 2009

La Paz, 2010

The city of Shenzehen seems pale and void of most color, while the photos of Madrid and La Paz have a reddish brown color to them. One of the other qualities to the body of work as a whole is how some cities have embraced their history and past and held off on immense urban renewal, while other cities have clearly wiped out their past and replaced it with new

structures.

Tel Aviv-Yafo III, 2007

In the project Horizons Leong does not always photograph a city, but I still see this work as relevant to the class as many of the images are of expansive horizons of cities. Again Leong keeps his picture making techniques consistent in each image, with the horizons falling in the same place, immense detail in each image, and in many images of cities there is a lack of any

real foreground to root yourself in. On occasion there may be some sort of sand, beach, or water, but there is no real way to access the city, lie his project Cities where you can see roads and cars in the foreground. The photographs when exhibited are displayed in a line.

Nan Shi, Huangpu District, Shanghai, 2004

In the project History Images Leong photographs different cities in China as they wipe out large older areas of cities and put up new structures. Many of the photographs show smaller older Chinese homes being torn down amongst mass amounts of rubble, with large skyscraper more westernized buildings. These photographs show a country removing its past architecture and inevitably its history in massive renewal projects.

Leong's work depicts cities of today and how they have developed in numerous ways around the world, some embracing their past and some such as China wiping it out almost completely. Through these images one sees different ways that cities and countries have dealt with urbanization, some of these things can see similar from place to place and others seem very different.

Week 12:

New York, Beside Itself

In Johanna Burton's New York, Beside Itself, begins by analyzing a section of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity where she discusses her urge to turn and look for the World Trade Center towers after September 11, and how she feels shame for doing this. Her reason for feeling shame came from her comparing the city to a face, a person. She explains that when turning to look for the familiar World Trade Center towers she does not find that familiarity, instead she is left staring/smiling at a "stranger" and this causes the shame or embarrassment. What Burton is interested in Sedgwick's writing is of her comparison of the city to a face. Burton also looks to Freud's writing on how nothing in mental life once formed can perish, and he asks his readers to imagine a city where all the old buildings

that are no longer standing are still there along with all of the new ones, and how this is like the mind. I thought this interactive map of New York that allows you to manipulate Manhattan over space and time was an interesting way to think about Freud's ideas that a space cannot have two different contents.

But this map is really on the base of the different contents and uses of a space, as Burton goes on to explain with artists such as Emily Roysdon and her images of the Pier 49 and her some what of a reenactment of David Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud piece all over the city. Burton claims that Roysdon "underlines the fact that the body occupies the city and is occupied by it and that it is through this reciprocal exchange that both continue to be actively reformed." This also goes back to Jane Jacobs's idea that a space should not have just one single use, and Burton discusses artists that do just that with a space.