Picturing the Modern City

Artists and Photographers have expressed the appearance of modernity in cities and urban area’s for many years. The term modernity means the quality and moving forward of an object or environment. Factors such as the industrial works, science and communication all have helped in the production and are still important in how the modern city expands and grows. Paris in the nineteenth century is seen as one of the main cities that first appeared to becoming modern. Architect, Baron Hausmann was seen to of rebuilt the main city centre in Paris. It gained new places of leisure for the middle-class to enjoy, whilst the poor were forced to the suburbs of the city. This was certainly enjoyed by impressionist painters who then became part of the leisured middle-classes, because the changes in the city that contributed to new subject matters. Art became even more popular, which showed new ways of looking at things, that also came from photography. The underclass became a attractive subject matter for artists and photographers because of their interesting experiences, which was the other side to upheaval of the city,  who had to cope with new modernisation that negatively effected their lives, that the artists generally became concerned. It was photography that presented this adverse side of the city, to create awareness to those who did not realise there was such poverty, to try and make it a more suitable place for social reform. Photographers such as Jacob Riis, captured similar situations to this in cities like New York. He presented many different back alley's and interesting characters in everyday situations, to show this to the other classes that had no idea what went on with the people that were considered below them. The start of the twentieth century saw the turn of vision into a modern technological place of the future. All art forms became more geometric and abstract, creating a difference and huge growth to the modernity of what the previous century was before. Cinema was a new art that showed this expansion in how technology was the future, by presenting films that showed the city as a place of destruction and ill morals, which photography and art have continued to also do and even to this day cities all over the world have changed and so has our perception because of the media and art forms that change our attitudes and opinions.