Photography has had an abiding relationship with the city. In the early 1900s Eugene Atget photographed a disappearing Paris; the patina of its ancient walls, the signs and objects of the trades that were carried out there, and the facades and windows of its restaurants and shops. In the latter we see serried rows of commodities, suits, dresses and uniforms on headless dummies, juxtaposed with price tickets and reflections in their windows. Mute faces look out from a restaurant or a cordonnier, framed by their façades, ornate sign writing and hand-simulated marble surfaces. In a photograph of 1924-25, ‘Boutique automobile, avenue de la Grande Armee’ the chrome headlamps and wheel hubs of the vehicles inside the showroom hover ambiguously next to the reflections of the buildings and trees in its plate glass window. The brand names of ‘Renault’, ‘Delage’, and ‘Talbot’ float sharply between the two. In Atget’s photographs we are seeing not only an old city fading but within that, literally, we also see the signs of things to come.

In 1939 Walter Benjamin wrote of the sensations of mechanized life in the industrial metropolis. Life in the city involved individuals in ‘a series of shocks and collisions’, with its ‘countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like’ a myriad of haptic experiences jostled with the optical ones provided by the surging crowd, the traffic and advertisements. He quotes Baudelaire, who likened the city dweller who learns to handle this environment to ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’. Among the actions and reflexes of this city dweller, the countless automated processes set in train by small actions of the hand, Benjamin gives pride of place to the photographer whose, ‘ touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time’. He sees this action as having the ‘greatest consequences’ as the camera preserves and relays the metropolitan experience, it ‘gave the moment a kind of posthumous shock’. (Benjamin: 1970 [1939]: 176-77).

At the time Benjamin was writing this in Paris, the photographer Berenice Abbott, who collected and made Atget’s work known in America, brought a version of his vision to bear upon New York. It is now that the Baudelaire’s kaleidoscope truly begins to appear as the city becomes, among other things, a multi layered text of advertising and display. In Abbott’s photograph ‘Columbus Circle’ (1933) giant corporate signs carried by soaring scaffolding overlap and intertwine with the city’s architecture. This however, is an image of physical, industrial structures where the massive signs are carried by riveted steel frameworks and disposed in a deep urban space.

It will be some three decades, in 1967, before Guy Debord declares that modern conditions of production have turned the world into an ‘immense accumulation of spectacles’, and until 1981, when Jean Baudrillard argues that reality has finally disappeared; extinguished behind its image and its hi-tech simulation. Gone now is the industrial scaffolding carrying the heavy metal and board signs with their crude illumination to be replaced by video screens and programmed digital displays. As this happens, the physical structure, the very architecture of the city, also recedes and gains a kind of invisibility behind the reflective surfaces and facades, and the images and visions that it now serves to carry, emit and project. Among others, a reference point here is Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision of the post-modern city. In ‘Bladerunner’ we were offered an early 80s vision of the Los Angeles of 2019 (now our near future). In one scene, Pris, a young female android desperately fleeing her terminator, crashes through a plate glass window. This replicant human, herself virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, precipitates a collapse of the mirrored surfaces that surround her in downtown Los Angeles. She shatters the thin and fragile surface between the sign and the thing; the inside and the outside (an inside: the stores, bars, restaurants and boutiques where all that is artificial is manufactured and consumed, and an outside: a world in which it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the actual from the virtual). In this way we are reminded that it is not only the technology of photography that has changed since the days of Benjamin’s street photographer, but also the spectacular nature of the streets themselves.

It was, of course, during the same period, the 1980s, in which these cinematic visions exercised our imaginations, that photography first met with the emerging technology of digital imaging. This also exercised our imaginations and, for some, this meeting was a fatal encounter. In the view of William J Mitchell, for example, the door began to shut on a century and a half during which chemical photography had temporarily stabilised the ‘process of image making’ in the service of an era dominated by science and industrialisation. In his view, as digital simulation looked set to displace the photographic record, an age – a short 150 year interlude - ‘of false innocence had passed’. As part of this discourse, ideas about a new ‘digital aesthetic’ and an ‘age of electrobricollage’ began to be rehearsed. Henceforth, image making would be characterised by ‘appropriation, transformation, reprocessing, and recombination’). Chemical photography would give way to a ‘post-photography’ privileging, ‘fragmentation, indeterminancy, and heterogeneity’ over the (presumed) objectivity and unity of traditional photographs.

This, of course, was all too simple. Not only did it overlook the many uses and kinds of image that photography has produced, but it also suggested that a new technology would necessarily lead to one particular cultural outcome. With a little retrospect we can see that none of these sweeping pronouncements have come to pass. There is now more photography than ever. The combined forces of Nokia, Motorola, and Sony have put more cameras into peoples’ hands than ever before and photography is ever more deeply embedded in everyday life. Everyone, as the phrase goes, ‘is now a photo-journalist’. The contents of the world’s photographic archives and vast catalogues of stock photography now circulate the globe electronically via the corporate image banks of Corbis and Getty Images. Alongside the ‘recombinative’ methods of some digital photographers there are others whose images are as resolved, unified, and crafted as those produced by the high priests of photographic modernism, or as focused upon a decisive moment or a telling relationship as those of the most perceptive documentarists.

Alongside the digitally enhanced possibilities for image recombination, generation and manipulation (the art of the electro-bricoleur) we can now also see that when an optical lens is attached to a digital camera, we are actually witnessing one more reinvention of an ancient machine: the camera. The detail and resolution of the images that can be made with digital cameras now surpasses the interest that a human being can take in them; they contain more information than anyone could want (Manovich 2003: 244). And, what does it matter, after all, that a photograph’s tonal values are determined by algorithms rather than chemical immersion ? (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 105-12). Is there so much at stake when the indexical quality of a photographic image is registered by an array of charge coupled devices rather than silver salts or electro magnetic particles? Well, there may be differences for sure: film formats need no longer determine the size and shape of an image, the commitment involved in making a single exposure has lessened, many of the hard-walled distinctions of chemical photographic practice, between taking, developing, printing, and exhibiting, have become permeable. We could go on. But the major point is this, and this is what Chris Kitze’s photographs remind us of: that powerful images prime our perception to the world around us. We need only to look at grass after contemplating a painting by Fra Angelico, or street furniture after looking at the photographs of Friedlander . . . .

Like Baudelaire’s city dweller as a ‘kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’, Chris Kitze alerts us, through his images, to the sheer visual intensity now reached by contemporary capitalism and consumer culture in its metropolitan centres; in Tokyo, New York, Paris, Shanghai. At times, the very surfaces of his images dissolve as what they represent - the hard, the metallic, the laminated, the glossy - become soft and fugitive,

only to reform again in another image, as continuous surfaces (material, reflected, or graphic) which abut sheerly on to one another. The scale too, can be bewildering; as a huge figure looms above us, striding over a building into a field of signs dominated by a ‘parental advisory’ notice.

Others are incredibly delicate, gossamer-like, while yet others show us banal signs that burn with a saturated intensity of colour.>/p>

There is a proposition in Chris Kitze’s work. These are images that he makes in the camera and in the midst of the city, not in a digital darkroom. He shows us that something that we might call a ‘digital aesthetic’ is as much in front of the camera as it is within it. It is a feature of the urban experience, of the built environment and the apparatus of consumer culture. It is a property of the world that he makes images of rather than of the technology with which he makes them.

Atget, ‘Boutique automobile, avenue de la Grande Armee’ (1924-25), Pl 65, ‘The Work of Atget : Modern Times’, (1985) Volume 1V, London, Gordon Fraser

Bolter, J and & Grusin, R (1999) ‘Remediation : understanding new media’, Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press

Walter Benjamin (1973) ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Hannah Arendt (ed) Illuminations, London, Fontana Collins.

Manovich, L (2003) ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography’ in Liz Wells (ed) The Photography Reader, London and New York, Routledge