Some Cities Book

At once poetic and provocative, Victor Burgin's Some Cities deftly juxtaposes photographs and texts in a manner that invites comparisons to the urban essays of filmmaker Chris Marker and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Best known for his artistic exploration of the divergent realities of images and words, Burgin is a gifted practitioner of montage with an acute sensitivity to all that is vibrant, uncanny, and appealing in the contemporary metropolis. Some Cities collects thoughts, places, and photographs along a life route that has taken the author from the North of England to his present home in northern California. From the cherry blossoms in a Tokyo park, to the skyscrapers of Singapore, it presents a series of stunning close-ups of the multicultural character of the late twentieth-century metropole. The itinerary of his book includes stops in Berlin, Warsaw, Woomera, New York, and the islands of Stromboli and Tobago. A prime example of the "spatial turn" associated with contemporary cultural studies and postmodern theories of subjectivity, Some Cities is a tour-de-force of subtle wit and imagination that employs Burgin's visual and verbal skills in the project of creating a suitable artistic language for representing the complex and shifting realities of the metropolis. "Unlike the promises we make to each other," Burgin writes, "the promise of the city can never be broken."