This volume brims with insights regarding the relation between urban space and photographic representation relevant to urban history. It is the first deliberately to survey the intersection of urban studies and photography studies. Introducing key concepts and concerns from these developing research areas, Tormey's most significant contribution is highlighting the formative role photographs can play in promoting ideas and shaping debates about urbanization. The city has long been appreciated and examined as a physical, social, cultural and mental space. But, given the ubiquity of photographic imagery, the powerful role of photographs as conduit between these spaces is too seldom acknowledged or scrutinized. From Thomas Annan's documentation of industrial Glasgow in 1868 to contemporary art in urban China, Tormey discusses a range of photographs to challenge uncritical notions of photography's objectivity.

However, urban historians will find Tormey's approach to cities and photography oblique. She focuses on the challenges of representation faced by the photographer in visualizing the contemporary city, rather than the challenges historians face in analysing and prioritizing different factors accounting for change in the historical city. The book's clearly stated purpose is to examine photography as a tool for exploring the individual's encounters with and within urban space. To do so, Tormey draws little on primary material and extensively on secondary literature about urbanism (including commentators like David Harvey, Edward Soja and Fredric Jameson, and concepts such as spectacle, surveillance and simulation). Complemented by ideas from photography theory (by the likes of Victor Burgin, John Tagg and Allan Sekula), Tormey thus examines ‘the power of the visually poetic as a method for provoking discussion’ (p. 245).

As a result of this potential mismatch between Tormey's approach to and historians’ interest in the subject, readers may have to work hard to extract and apply ideas or methodologies. This is certainly possible. It is also necessary to meet the challenge of engaging with photographs not as inert artefacts or transparent evidence, but as agents in processes of meaning-making central to urban history. Part One, ‘Contexts’, is the most relevant in meeting this challenge. Much conceptual explication is offered here, although the separate discussion of urban space and photographic representation is sometimes unsatisfying. Chapter 3 goes some way to integrating discussion of the two research fields. In Part Two, ‘The documented city’, Tormey draws on Michel de Certeau to contrast ways of seeing immanent in documentary and street photography. The book's third and final section, ‘The metaphorical city’, is perhaps the least relevant, though it provides an engaging review of the strategies and preoccupations of contemporary art and documentary practice.

Readers may bristle at some generalizations and abstractions, such as ‘Foucault describes the twentieth-century epoch as characterized by simultaneity, juxtaposition and dispersal and the foregrounding of spatiality over a preoccupation with history’ (p. 116). Urban historians who strive to balance general theories with detailed analyses might want (to employ postmodern punning) less opacity and more specificity. At points, too, the book piles up concepts (from Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus to Roland Barthes’ studium / punctum distinction) without clearly drawing out through examples the contribution of this terminology to understanding urban form and experience. A more selective and synthetic approach to relevant theories might have allowed greater space for discussion of significant phenomena which Tormey touches on.

One example is the relation between photographic imagery and the modern movement. Le Corbusier is referenced repeatedly, being made to stand for the ‘abstract and rational idealism’ (p. 220) of modernist architecture and planning. Yet, his was an architectural vision in no simple sense; his publications (as influential as his buildings) were saturated with photographic imagery. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, Tormey suggests the capacity of photography to present a simplified image of the city, draining it of social, political and economic complexity. Albeit without reference to Jane Jacobs, she also notes how utopian urban renewal can mistake visual order for social order. The manner in which photography is implicated in this mistake, however, is not explored in any depth. What was the relation, say, between urban renewal in post-war Europe and slum photography from the inter-war depression, the radical perspective offered planners by aerial photography, or the abstractions of architectural photography by image-makers like Lucien Hervé? The history of modernist architecture and planning is an intellectual and visual history, as much as an urban and social one. More detailed analyses of a range of historical imagery – of the operative role of photography in shaping decisive debates – would have added another dimension to this engaging book.

Notwithstanding these sticking points, the book should appeal to those interested in increasing their awareness of the way photography performs and promotes particular perspectives and points of view. Postgraduates and scholars keen to advance the interdisciplinary traditions of urban history will glean insights into productive areas of interface between photography studies and urban studies.