In the late 1960s, a private developer quietly purchased most of the properties in a six-block area of the Montreal neighbourhood known as Milton-Parc. The plan was to demolish a landscape that dated from the late nineteenth-century and redevelop it with modern construction, including twenty-five storey apartment buildings, a twenty-nine storey office building, and a hotel. A coalition of activists rose up in opposition, knocking on doors and taking to the streets. Among them were two twenty-something Milton-Parc residents named David Miller and Clara Gutsche. The pair mobilized their budding interests in photography to document the neighbourhood’s buildings and community at the beginning of a protracted era of transformation. Their work demonstrated the continued durability and vitality of an aging landscape that had been marked for removal. In this way, they continued a lineage of documentary photography focused on urban change that also includes Eugène Atget’s photographs of early twentieth-century Paris and Berenice Abbott’s 1930s documentation of changing New York.

The visual record that Miller and Gutsche produced offers a valuable window into the relationship between photography and architecture during the era of urban renewal. Of course, they were not the first photographers to take up this subject. Images have served to picture blight, thereby sanctioning demolition, in various slum clearance projects: from turn-of-the-century Leeds, England, and New York City’s Lower East Side, to Robert Moses’s postwar Manhattan, to post-industrial Detroit. But the work of Miller and Gutsche expands the role of photographs in such stories. Rather than serving solely as agents of destruction, photographs can also become allies of resistance and conservation. As Miller was most interested in documenting the built landscape, his work continues in the tradition of architectural photographers like those of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), who have composed formal portraits of significant, sometimes at-risk buildings since the 1930s. In complement, Clara Gutsche’s images of more social subjects recall the work of documentary photographers like Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and, more recently, Ira Nowinski. Her work also suggests that the scope of the architectural photographic archive need not be limited to buildings alone. Rather, this archive should also centrally include representations of people situated within their built environment.

Read more