The Image of the city

Based on the Eames exhibition ‘Photography and the City’ designed for the Smithsonian Institute. This documentary looks at the changing representation of cities based on the available technologies of the time. In the late nineteenth century photography not only provided popular views of distant monuments and foreign cities, but by rendering things and events objectively, became a valuable tool in the examination of social systems. At the turn of the century, photographers experimented with kites to capture aerial images of cities. Today [1969], specialists working in environmental fields are using a wide variety of photographic techniques to study and clarify urban problems. Tools such as multiband cameras, radar images , computer-generated graphics, satellite observations and thermograms are making available new information about our cities, their environment, and the influences upon them. Alex Funke, Parke Meek and David Olney involved in production, music by Gerald Fried.