I Photograph, Therefore I Am: Photography as Embodied Spatial Practice in the Contemporary City
Eleni Han | Royal College of Art
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/UOWU5425
Publication: Volume 7
Abstract | In an era dominated by visual media, photography has become a routine, embodied way of inhabiting the city. This paper asks how the everyday act of photographing urban space, encompassing both the act of capturing and circulating images, reshapes the perception, appropriation, memory, and design of contemporary cities. Drawing together the observational urbanism of William H. Whyte and Jan Gehl, the visual methodologies of Sarah Pink and Gillian Rose, and the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, the paper situates photography as a multidimensional spatial practice rather than a neutral form of documentation. Through reflective accounts of my own photographic practice as an architect and urban researcher, and through a comparative reading of the High Line and the Promenade Plantée, it argues that photography simultaneously enables embodied appropriation of space and risks producing the homogenised, “Instagrammable” urbanism it documents. In doing so, the paper problematises a photographic culture in which the photogeneity of urban space is increasingly valued over its social functionality, where spaces are designed to be framed rather than inhabited, and where the sensory and social qualities that fall outside the frame are neglected. The paper concludes that designers must not treat photography as an after-effect of the built environment, but as one of its constitutive practices.
Keywords | Photography and Urban Space, Urban Design, Urban Planning, Embodied Spatial Practice, Visual Methodologies, Visual Narratives, Psychological Ownership, Collective Memory, “Instagrammable” Urbanism, Photographic Reproduction, Photographic Culture
Eleni Han (eleni.han@network.rca.ac.uk) is an architect and researcher based in London, UK, who came to write about photography through the habit of photographing the cities she works in. She trained at the University of Thessaly and the University of Pennsylvania, and completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art in 2023, supported by the Onassis Foundation, on architecture recaptured by the emancipation of photography. Alongside her practice as an architectural designer, she has taught design studio at the RCA, the University of Westminster, and the University of Hertfordshire, contributed to Future Archive (2019) with Herzog & de Meuron and the photographer Rut Blees Luxembourg, and co-led Curating as Research, a project on curating as a form of architectural enquiry supported by the Paul Mellon Centre.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Han, Eleni. “I Photograph, Therefore I Am: Photography as Embodied Spatial Practice in the Contemporary City.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 7, 07 Sep. 2026, pp. 1.1–1.21, https://doi.org/10.71106/UOWU5425.