As a result, and only after much deliberation and self-critique of the 'documentary' content of my material, 'Visible Cities' emerged as a representation of the city [especially this city] as an unstable subject. Berlin is by no means a describable place - not one city, not even two, but many.

about Visible Cities

The 'cities' - face-laminated 1.5 x 1.0 m [60 x 42 in] blue-toned silver prints - are stretched and floated off the wall with simple hardware. Their individual names are borrowings from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Here as in that book, descriptions of external phenomenae such as cities are deemed to represent more precisely the notion of a complex interior space - the subjectivity of the reporter.

In the studio, my original negatives and other images of Berlin were projected onto three-dimensional constructions of consumed plastic containers and rephotographed on positive film. The resulting film positives were then printed as negatives, so that the positive material in them became negative in the print and vice versa. The familiar space of conventional architectural imagery was thus warped with unlikely or impossible perspectives, but also by the apparently absurdist element of the plastic debris.

From my point-of-view however, the designed spaces of architecture and of consumer packaging are not incongruent - both indexing the way consumption-culture conceives and incorporates space as commodifiable units. Visitors to the ruins of our time will more easily recognise this congruency.

In 'Visible Cities' the sublime illusion of historic or futuristic Utopias appears questionable; Dystopian examples [like cardboard cities] are more likely.

Graham Budgett, 1993