"The Choreographed City: The Photographs of Mona Breede"

Mona Breede's photographs capture the chaotic and leveling atmosphere of big cities that allows for anonymity and isolation, even within a crowded arena. She arrests the movement of the contemporary cityscape in her composites, capturing people navigating the architecture and each other. In most of Breede’s images people appear small and almost toy-like against the vast built environment. She uses dramatic lighting to create an ambiguous, hyper-real atmosphere in images that are dynamic but also possess the eerily static character of architectural renderings

To create her images Breede combines elements from multiple photographs, all shot from the same camera position at the same location. Typically she observes the light at a location during the course of a full day in order to discover when it is the most moody and atmospheric. Then she exposes her background image. Breede subsequently returns to the site many times to record people passing through. Later, at her computer, she begins the difficult work of composing the image — executing the “choreography,” as she describes it — of people in the urban environment. Breede is careful to place her figures in poses that could have happened, positioning each person in a way that mimics the patterns and behaviors she observed at the scene.

Her compositions are seamless, but there are hints that something is awry. Ultimately it is the light that carries any telltale evidence of fabrication. Because Breede combines pictures from different times of the day in one composition, there are often multiple lighting conditions contained within a single image. This technique heightens the feeling that the city is a stage set, that the architecture is a backdrop in front of which human players act. It is not a coincidence that before and during her studies in photography and design at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany, Breede often took pictures of dance and theater productions.

This feeling of a stage set causes the people in Breede’s images to appear disconnected from each other as well as from their surroundings. She cites French existentialist author Albert Camus as an influence, specifically his notion of the absurd, which is based on the idea that human beings are alienated from the world because they yearn for order and meaning while the world only offers chaos and suffering. In Breede’s photographs, human beings appear estranged from one another, and also from their environments, isolated within the populated, yet desert-like city described by Camus in his notebooks.

In its exploration of architecture as a backdrop for human activity, Breede’s work also relates to that of her former professor, Thomas Struth, with whom she studied in Karlsruhe. Like Struth, she makes pictures that depict two worlds intertwined but still operating distinctly — the built environment and the human motion within it. Breede’s approach is less documentary than Struth’s, however. She focuses less on the built environment that Struth favors, and more on the people within in it — the architecture ultimately playing a supporting role to the people and the light, which are the real protagonists of her pictures.

In his essay Walking in the City, French writer Michel de Certeau cites the swarming mass of people as a collection of singularities whose “intertwined paths give shape to spaces. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’ They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize”1 The city might appear as a unified, cohesive whole, but the walker at street level moves in ways that are not fully determined by organizing bodies or any superstructure of power. In her photographs, Breede arrests individual actions and overlapping everyday activities in order to make them apparent. She further demonstrates that it is precisely these individual actions that give the city its constantly changing character by using the same backgrounds in two pictures from Chicago (Winners I, II) and three from Shanghai (Laomiao I-III). In both sets of pictures the tenor of the city is transformed by her choice of who is depicted within the frame and the narratives that they evoke.

The rigid modernism of the architecture that exists in many of the world’s cities today stemmed partly from a desire for a more harmonious, regimented, and utopian existence on the part of architects and urban planners. Ultimately Breede’s photographs suggest that despite homogenizing factors such as globalization and modernism, every city is unique. In her work the architecture is only the backdrop for stories and lives that prevent the city from disappearing into the generic. This is less a commentary on the failure of utopian vision than a recognition that cities are much more than their architecture — they are an unruly, constantly shifting blend of energy, climate, people, actions, ways of thinking, planning, infrastructure, and light — each one a unique microcosm of humanity.

Karen Irvine, Museum of Contemporary Photography
Columbia College Chicago

1) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), S. 97.

 
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