Some Cities (Topographics) - Softcover

Burgin, Victor

4.04

26 ratings by Goodreads

9780948462894: Some Cities (Topographics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0948462892 ISBN 13: 9780948462894

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2003

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"Our relations with cities are like our relations with people. We love them, hate them, or are indifferent toward them. On our first day in a city that is new to us, we go looking for the city. We go down this street, around that corner. We are aware of the faces of passers-by. But the city eludes us, and we become uncertain whether we are looking for a city, or for a person."

Victor Burgin recalls some of the cities he has known in a way familiar to all who have traveled, by showing photographs and telling anecdotes. Some Cities gathers places and moments along a life route that the author has taken from the north of England to his present home in northern California. Stops on the way include such disparate sites as London, Berlin and Warsaw; Singapore, Woomera and Tokyo; New York and San Francisco; and the islands of Stromboli and Tobago.

Some Cities is unlike anything Burgin has ever done before, although it explores characteristic themes of his earlier theoretical and visual works, such as the dimensions of politics and sexuality in everyday life.

"Burgin traces his life's route from the north of England through such metropolises as London, Berlin, Singapore, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco in brilliant black and white photographs and in anecdotes presented in immaculate prose."—The Guardian

"a witty, poignant and evocative personal travelogue"—The Independent on Sunday

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Review:

A captivating meditation on the nature of cities and how we see ourselves in relation to them. Written in travelogue form, this marvelous text is presented beside the authors own black-and-white photographs. Victor Burgin, a professor on the Board of Studies in History of Consciousness at the University of California, documents his travels from his native England to London, Berlin, New York, Singapore, and the islands of Stromboli and Tobago. When we see through Burgin's eyes, our relationships to the cities we know are gently transformed to the point that we may even view them as works of art.

From the Inside Flap:

"Victor Burgin is an important artist whose work has played a major role for many years. He has also made a number of decisive contributions as a cultural theorist. What is so captivating about Some Cities is that it combines both sides of his work. The photographs and the text address the elusive yet pervasive condition of the city. The form is that of the travel book, where each city, no matter how 'foreign,' is treated as home. So much of our discourse over the last one and a half centuries has depended on such texts. Some Cities will take its rightful place in this lineage, one that will no doubt continue."—Mark Wigley, Princeton University

"Victor Burgin extends his exceptional skills in managing the text/image interaction to the form of the book: a meditation on cities that is at the same time an autobiography, a work of cultural criticism, an essay on the history of industrialized culture, and a dramatic enactment of the functions of irony, humor, and political analysis in a world irrevocably altered by the mobility of people, things, and ideas in our time."—Norman Bryson, Harvard University

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