This course will examine the often complex, often contradictory ways photography was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to capture the development of the modern city. That is to say, the course will approach photography and modern urban planning as complimentary technologies and address how, together, they give expression to the conditions of modern life by bringing them – by bringing modernity – into a distinct kind of focus, one whose clarity conceals as much as it reveals. At the same time, then, the course will be about representation and its various operations.