Cities are products of human civilization—they shape human activity while being shaped by it. As cities rapidly evolve, their landscapes are in constant flux. Baudelaire once quipped, "The appearance of a city changes faster than the human heart." Urban spaces serve as stages for human interaction and as subjects for photographers’ prolonged gazes, anchoring inner order against the whirlwind of change.

From May 8–11, 2025, PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai celebrated its tenth anniversary at the Shanghai Exhibition Center. For the occasion, Oui Art highlights photographic works that delve into space, reshaping internal landscapes.

Amid today’s proliferation of conceptual art movements, street documentary photography retains its irreplaceable charm. Creators, works, and audiences collectively construct contemporary visions of "seeing" across time. This year’s fair debuted Benrido, founded in 1887 as a small bookstore-turned-art publisher renowned for exquisite collotype prints. They showcased works from Provoke-era photographers Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira. In late-1960s Japan, these artists rebelled against commercialized aesthetics with high-contrast, grainy images, using their cameras to measure their relationship with the city—"inciting thought" through "rough, blurry, out-of-focus" visuals.

In today’s society of the spectacle, where AI and social media algorithms blur "reality," Provoke feels prophetic. When slogans like "This filter makes you Daido Moriyama" sell cameras, can we still experience the aura of truth in an image-saturated world?

Meanwhile, in 1960s America—where black-and-white documentary dominated—Saul Leiter captured New York’s tenderness in color film. His snow- and rain-streaked labyrinths omit era-defining markers, with strangers often shrouded in shadow. For Leiter, color was a balm, lending his work the texture of "fading dreams."

These misty images recall Liu Yichang’s opening lines in The Drunkard: "Rusty emotions meet rainy days; thoughts play hide-and-seek in cigarette smoke. Through the window, raindrops blink on branches—falling like dancers’ footsteps from leaves." Street photography rejects grand narratives, discarding temporal coordinates. "Memory labyrinths illuminated by chance light" may be the emotional "rust remover" our hyper-defined era needs.

Contemporary photographers adopt "anti-reportage" approaches, slowing time to let spaces "speak" their layered histories. As Candida Höfer—a disciple of the Bechers—notes: "What people do in spaces, and how spaces affect them, becomes clearer when no one is present. Like an absent guest, the space becomes the subject."

Höfer treats theaters as "social sculptures," using large-format cameras to document empty interiors. Benrido exhibited her White Bench 2019, while de Sarthe presented Palacio de los Deportes II, Mexico City 2015—a spiral staircase where dark railings dissolve into white walls. Even derelict theaters whisper of past grandeur through her lens.

In contrast, Lisson Gallery displayed Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters series (begun in 1976), where entire films are compressed into single exposures. The screens glow as white rectangles—primordial energy echoing his seascapes. These "Platonic caves" of vacant seats confront us with the "superposition of arrival and departure."

Giovanni Ozzola also manipulates time, using windows and mirrors to blur urban/natural boundaries. His fractured glass installations create illusions of layered space, while his latest works feature horizons that dissolve day into night—ruins meeting oceans, sand invading interiors.

Roger Ballen’s "absurd theater" merges reality and fiction. Inspired by Beckett and Ionesco, his "documentary fiction" stages unsettling scenes with graffiti, animals, and mannequin parts. "Human actions lack reason, direction, or ultimate purpose," he jests.

Artists fragment and reconstruct urban imagery, probing materiality and cultural identity through collage or digital techniques.

Xing Danwen’s "New York Wide" and Scroll A/B trace her journey from Beijing to New York, exploring "body and space" as an outsider.

Ayumi Cave Gallery and ori.studio presented Osamu Kanemura’s Gate Hack Eden—a book deconstructing Tokyo’s post-bubble chaos into homogeneous fragments. His photos omit people, focusing on tangled wires and skewed angles.

Cities anchor themes of migration and cultural reinvention. Filmmakers’ photographs freeze narrative moments, turning urban backdrops into protagonists.

Yang Fudong’s The Crowd (exhibited at M+) references 1970s–90s Hong Kong cinema, with black-and-white stills hovering between history and fiction. A spiral staircase in one still echoes Höfer’s—reminding us that aesthetic or historical paths often spiral.

Curated by Shi Hantao, Liquid Light featured Jia Zhangke’s Tattoo Series and cinematographer Yu Lik-wai’s Great Happiness. Apichatpong Weerasethakul contributed Signs and Illusions—a photo of a sign factory’s backside overlaid with film perforations from Memoria.

Young artist Lei Anqiao (PETITREE Gallery) constructs visual parables in Girl City, using European-style architecture to metaphorize youthful vulnerability: "Young bodies occupy urban space chaotically, yet assert dominance."

"In the spectacle, time congeals into an endless exhibition, each second peddling illusions of the future," wrote Guy Debord. As photography interrogates urban textures, this summer invites us to re-see cities through personal experience—finding poetry in their cracks.”