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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.
Will Straw
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