Street photography is a protracted series of interrogations. One of those interrogations looks to the way people move through built environments. Although we might once have constructed our buildings in service of people, it’s not apparent to me how that is true anymore. Our urban spaces have assumed an internal logic that has flipped the standard assumptions and now places people in service of buildings. But I’m not certain of this. Me and my camera pose our questions and have begun our investigations.
The global pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the investigations. I was preparing to file a definitive report on the way our urban spaces have enslaved the people who use them, like the victims of an alien invasion movie, when the arrival of the Sars-Cov-2 virus undid my working assumption. For months, hectares of office space lay empty. Shops that served the office workers went bankrupt. Without foot traffic, custodians stopped mopping the floors. In certain sectors, new technologies have obviated the need for in-person work. In the blink of an eye, people abandoned their built environments, or at least those built environments tied to work.
I had thought my images of people passing through steamy cityscapes spoke to the fleeting nature of the human presence in built environments. But the global pandemic has changed the meaning of those images. The human presence is fleeting, not because the overbearing logic of built spaces renders humans insignificant, but because the overbearing logic of digital spaces has asserted primacy over our built spaces. Humans aren’t vanishing from built spaces so much as evaporating into the ether.
