Hello, Munich students! I hope you’re thriving and having the time of your lives in Germany. Since I’m not able to wander the city streets with you, I’ll be talking with you virtually about your experiences there. Today I’ve posted a little blurb about a photographer from the previous century whose name has become synonymous with the idea of the urban observer. I hope it will inspire you to create your own posts based on your first impressions of Munich!
For some thirty years around the turn of the 20th century, a photographer named Eugène Atget was a fixture on the streets of Paris. His photos of city life – its streets and buildings and parks, its people and animals, its shop windows and their displays – present an urban landscape shaped by a rising population, an increase in mass commerce and unprecedented access to goods, and a relation to nature that suggested both fading beauty and new possibilities, many of them related to commercial activity. These photographs of Paris storefronts offer examples of that new relation to nature.
In these images we see the natural world reconstituted in a different context on city streets, with a new logic based on mass availability and commerce rather than compatibility, on a global rather than a place-specific environment. We see the extent to which human activity shapes the reality of “nature” in the city.
How do things look in Munich a century later? How does nature insert itself into the urban environment, and how do people in the city consciously incorporate it? What are the social and economic contexts in which nature plays a role? Why do you think nature remains such a prominent part of the city? To what extent is the relation to nature static – historical, established – or more fluid?
We look forward to seeing and hearing about your impressions!