The Urban Text turns Michel de Certeau's concept of the city as legible text into a photographic practice, using abstraction and the flâneur's unhurried gaze to expose the grammar of urban space hiding in plain sight.
About This Book
Jon Setter's photography refuses the spectacle of the city in favour of its residue — the colours, patterns, textures and materials that constitute a place's true character. Working from chance encounters on unprescribed walks, Setter composes images that reduce urban surfaces to near-unrecognisable fragments, defamiliarising the everyday architecture we move past without seeing. The project is grounded in de Certeau's notion of the urban text: the idea that cities are dense systems of overlapping narratives, most of which go unread. Setter's lens slows that reading down, isolating the micro-level details of the built environment to argue that attentive looking is itself a form of urban knowledge. Essential for photographers, architects, and urbanists interested in how cities accumulate meaning at street level.
Key Features
- 104 pages of abstracted urban photography exploring colour, pattern, texture and material in the built environment
- Published by Emblem Books, 2020
What You'll Discover
- How de Certeau's theory of the urban text translates into a rigorous photographic methodology — chance-driven, walk-based, and formally precise
- The way abstraction functions as a critical tool: by stripping surfaces to near-unrecognisable detail, Setter forces a re-engagement with familiar urban environments
- How the vernacular materials of any given city — its particular palette of concrete, paint, tile and signage — encode cultural and historical specificity
- A case for formal concerns over identity politics in urban photography: that space itself, read through its essential grammar, carries its own complex argument
About the Author
Jon Setter (b. 1989, Detroit) is a Sydney-based photographer whose practice centres on the overlooked surfaces and spaces of urban environments. Working from unplanned walks through cities, he develops the colours, patterns, materials and textures of the urban vernacular into abstracted photographic compositions that expand conventional readings of the cityscape.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 104
- Dimensions: 195 x 280 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780980701852
- Publisher: Emblem Books
- Publication Date: 2020
Perfect For: Photographers, architects, urban designers, and cultural theorists drawn to the intersection of the built environment, everyday life, and photographic abstraction.