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Regulating the View: Who gets to go high? Looking from the Tall Building (1): The Shard

This room of our exhibition will explore pictures from a particular high place but will focus on the work of non-professional photographers, who Garret names ‘urban explorers’ (UE for short), whose aims in making photography is not primarily the production of an art-object but of an experiential record at some remove and considered as secondary and inferior to the experience thus recorded. Indeed this goes for the word-pictures of the experiences as well as collateral photography. This group is described by Bradley Garrett (2013)[1] who underwent ethnographic fieldwork with that group as a participant observer.

McKellar (2018) conceptualises The Shard as an example of a contemporary ‘viewing platform’ (3.2.1) that has emerged as an offshoot of the ‘blow up’ (3.3.2) of the London skyline. A deregulated City has spawned it seems a new ‘iconography of elevation’, and with it commercial practices that sell experience of that ‘elevation’. Hence the existence of an enterprise that whose brand and process is deeply involved with the ‘View from the Shard’ selling a group of commodities predicated on a common interest on that ‘view’, especially at ‘night’ when the prices rise. We need only vicariously experience a group of screenshots from The Shard website[2].

The word associations are clear – heights, luxury and the feel of the superhuman sensation, of going ‘further than the eye can see’. Gilbert (2010) is happy to see such experiences, together with the larger democratic potential of the internet represented by that global conglomerate Google as accessing a new means of satisfying the ‘pleasures of the imagination’ in an aerial vision that is freer and more democratic than that of the past. And it may do that, in the same way that the cult of the ‘celebrity’ in contemporary culture harnesses the identifiably ‘ordinary’, or the identifiably ‘common’, with emotional material that justifies the presence of hierarchy and freedom from mundane control from the top as a phenomenon of nature. The experience is one in which the democratic base of society justifies the experience of luxury, ‘high’ living and great prospects as one that belongs at the top and which it sees only irregularly and at cost and succumbs to its imaginative charm before it returns to where it belongs, nearer the bottom.

In a sense this is the Apollonian vision – it justifies an ordered hierarchy and sees its beauty as a reflection of the comfort at the top they temporarily occupy. That is why it is not, as Gilbert suggests, Dionysian – it threatens no-one and, in the end, votes to sustain the status quo. Those walls of glass are still walls and emphasise by virtue of the reflections they sustain an interiority that is smugly comfortable able to project its satisfaction into the outer world and to constitute ‘aerial views’ as things of a framed beauty. The external architecture supplies such frames which also hold up this structure – are the means of an uncommon but temporary elevation (of emotion and thought – ‘further than the eye can see’). From here ‘order, organization, and visual coherence’ of the external world is provided by the framing architecture and the comforts invisibly provided by its services. Of course from inside to outside the supporting architecture that holds up the curtain wall of glass must seem like a frame that protects and shelters.

This way of seeing things is therefore in danger of losing the nuanced view of the iconography of elevation McKellar proposes, though which she also questions as perhaps far from ‘offering true accessibility’. To get back to nuance we might need to look for a true Dionysian experience of a view from the Shard. I’m looking for this in the section of the exhibition in photographs by non-professionals of forbidden views from the top. Urban explorers as described by Garrett (2010) are people who refuse and deny rules that restrict their access, even when these rules are based (or rationalised depending on your attitude) by the health and safety of the ‘public’. Urban explorers penetrate depths unseen by others (parts of the disused Underground, sewers) and heights that take you to fear and privation, if also excitement, rather than luxury and comfort. As an example here is a poor reproduction of an unattributed photograph showing Garret (2018:2-4) in action as a participant urban explorer observer, pulling:

“… myself to the end of the counterweight (on the roof of the Shard) and peered down over the edge, down to the River Thames where the permanently docked HMS Belfast battleship looked like a bathroom toy.

The key picture is this one again unattributed and untitled. It shares with the other a sense of being framed in such a way as to make its frames conscious to us – bring a message of ‘I am just a photo inadequate to the experience I record’. This deliberate refusal of being art suggests that the photograph of object attempts a kind of neutrality between the viewer and the true artistic experience, unmediated views bought at the cost of transgression, danger and hard labour. This, if anything is the Dionysian that Gilbert only whimsically aligns with a person at home in high flight across London on Google. This is transgressive. We have no comfortable place from which to evaluate it as viewers.