ephemera impermanence time
‘[…] the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.’ – Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science
collections encounters
microcartography | secret cameras by espen lunde nielsen
the map of the camel driver
In ‘Cities and Desire I’ of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities , two ways of understanding the city of Dorothea are described: that of the cartographer, describing the city in numbers, quarters and birds-eye perspectives, and that of the camel- driver, who knows the city through its near components, interactions and faces of its inhabitants. As does Calvino’s cartographer, architects tend to understand the city on an overall macro-level through cartographic and diagrammatic representations, in which the manifold spatial and ordinary qualities either disappear or are purposely left out. As the early twentieth century mapmaker, Leconte, was doing his ongoing updates of Nouveau Plan de Paris Monumental – a map of the extraordinary monuments of post-Haussmann Paris, Eugene Atget accumulated a completely different kind of knowledge and reality of the city as a flâneur, drifting around the streets with his large-format wooden camera on his shoulders. He captured the (infra-)ordinary and ephemera of le vieux Paris : its street corners, shop windows, inhabitants, street-peddlers, prostitutes, stairways and living rooms until, finally, more than 10,000 photographs later, he stated that ‘I can truthfully say that I possess all of old Paris’. The knowledge or ‘map’ produced by the two speaks of two completely different realities; in Atget’s version of Paris, the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Boulevards do not exist, or at least are not the focal points of the city. In Leconte’s maps, the city is constituted of these alone, leaving the in- between as a flat tone of nothingness.
18
top: A Leconte. ‘Plan Monumental Paris & Environs Itineraire Metropolitan’, published in the 1928 tourist pocket map of Paris, Nouveau Paris Monu- mental Itineraire Pratique de L’Etranger Dans Paris 27 x 21 inches : 68.58 x 53.34cm above: Eugène Atget: ‘Cour, Rue de Valence, Paris’, ca. 1920 Automobile and two motorcycles in front of garage in a courtyard, 5 e Arrondissement, Paris, France. From the portfolio 20 pho- tographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927 by Berenice Abbott, 1956 From the PH Filing Series at the Library of Congress
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator