Andrés Vargas (GT)
Andrés Vargas (GT)
Nathan Millis (US)
Mike Murphy (US)
Iain Cocks (HK)
Mike Murphy (US)
Ira Wagner (US)
Thomas Locke Hobbs (US)
Postbox Ghana (GH)
Cyrus Cornut (FR)
Anna Paola Guerra (BR)
Michal Florence Schorro (CH)
Arturo Soto (GB)
Maximilian Virgili (DE)
Rob Stephenson (US)
Thomas Pirot (DE)
Info
allcitiesarebeautiful.com is a continuously expanding curated digital archive. Since 2018, the platform has published visual and textual contributions that engage with urban spaces, cityscapes, and visual culture. It follows a broader understanding of the archive, conceiving it not as a closed entity but as a dynamic, open structure, and positions itself both as a repository of memory and as a discursive space: it provides long-term access to visual and textual works while simultaneously creating opportunities to situate these materials within new theoretical and societal contexts. At its core, the archive brings together (artistic) documentary projects, interviews, essays, and theoretical texts that negotiate the city as a visual and social phenomenon, with all contributions provided by various photographers, authors, and researchers and curated editorially. allcitiesarebeautiful.com does not operate as a static collection but as an open system, continually evolving and enabling new connections between its contents.
Two central principles guide allcitiesarebeautiful.com: on the one hand, the documentation of urban spaces through the collection of visual and textual works that reveal their spatial-material, social and symbolic-cultural significance as well as their transformation—such as the demolition, construction, or repurposing of buildings, changes in infrastructure, and the revaluation or reconfiguration of specific places—and, on the other hand, the creation of a discursive framework that opens up new contexts in which photographs, videos, and texts can be brought into relation with one another. The archive is therefore not conceived as a mere accumulative but as a system of statement formations that determines which perspectives on urban spaces become visible and within which frames they can be interpreted. Through its very structure—the division into interviews, projects, texts, and publications—an ordering system emerges that shapes perception and enables specific readings, while the editorial selection of contributions continuously negotiates not only which forms of urban spaces and which geographic locations are made visible but also how they are read, connected, and which mediating voices are heard and amplified.
At the same time, (urban) space is not conceived as a neutral backdrop but as the outcome of social practices, conflicts, and imaginations—producing, in the form of a cityscape, not only topographical configurations but also the social and cultural processes that shape them. Each visual or textual work within the archive thus also points to the practice of perceiving space (sensually, aesthetically, in the sense of seeing, observing, interpreting), of using and shaping it (through acting, transforming, rebuilding), of appropriating it, and of symbolically charging it—thereby assigning meaning. The photographs themselves are not presented merely as documents but as acts that open up relationships between photographer, depicted space, and viewer—that is, social relations. An image of a street or square, for example, can thus also become an entry point into questions of power, ownership, and belonging. In combination with interviews and texts, it becomes evident that photography does not simply represent but actively intervenes in social and political processes.
Unlike other platforms or social media, where the sheer volume of content inevitably causes individual contributions to lose visibility and significance, allcitiesarebeautiful.com follows a different logic: by collecting works within a clearly defined thematic field—urban spaces and their visual as well as textual reflections—meaning is generated precisely through quantity. This curated brute force archive does not rely on the representativeness of individual works—such as selecting a single image deemed typical or iconic to stand pars pro toto for something larger (a city or place)—but instead on repetition, variation, and density within the overall corpus. This approach shifts the epistemic logic of meaning: significance no longer arises from the interpretative elevation of individual works, which would establish a canonical view and reduce the diversity of possible perspectives to a few supposedly representative examples. Instead, meaning emerges from the statistical, cumulative structure of the archive itself, foregrounding density as a mode of knowledge production. The volume of contributions forms patterns, renders transformations visible, and creates a form of legibility that extends beyond any single work. What matters is no longer which document is chosen to stand for the whole, but whether it is recognised as belonging within the framework defined by the archive. In this sense, the archive reveals its character as a dispositif of inclusion and exclusion, as a political practice of making visible, and as a site of material excess in which the social relations of the city become tangible through their very density. This, too, constitutes a political gesture: it is not a single iconic image that shapes collective memory but the entirety of visual traces. Voices, places, and perspectives that would remain invisible within a classical canon become visible here precisely because they are part of the mass—meaning does not reside in a single image or viewpoint standing for the whole; the whole itself emerges only through the sum of all images.
In short, allcitiesarebeautiful.com generates meaning through quantity and context rather than by highlighting individual icons, following the idea that archives not only preserve but also produce new meanings through their very practice. In this sense, allcitiesarebeautiful.com positions itself as a living archive that, with each new publication, not only expands its holdings and thereby shifts the context of what already exists but also enhances the legibility of the works already present and, moreover, continually creating new connections between its contents and alternative approaches to urban spaces through its digital interface.
Kenneth Mewis (US)
Enoch Ku (US)
Andrés Vargas (GT)
Andy Feltham (GB)
Mike Murphy (US)
Andrés Vargas (GT)
Stewart Lawrence (US)
Max Zerrahn (DE)
Ben Bloom (US)
Archie McLeish (GB)
Maximilian Virgili (DE)
Michal Florence Schorro (CH)
Thomas Brodin (US)
Alvin Lau (MY)
Consiglio Manni (IT)
Thomas Locke Hobbs (US)
Enoch Ku (US)
Rob Stephenson (US)
Info
allcitiesarebeautiful.com is a continuously expanding curated digital archive. Since 2018, the platform has published visual and textual contributions that engage with urban spaces, cityscapes, and visual culture. It follows a broader understanding of the archive, conceiving it not as a closed entity but as a dynamic, open structure, and positions itself both as a repository of memory and as a discursive space: it provides long-term access to visual and textual works while simultaneously creating opportunities to situate these materials within new theoretical and societal contexts. At its core, the archive brings together (artistic) documentary projects, interviews, essays, and theoretical texts that negotiate the city as a visual and social phenomenon, with all contributions provided by various photographers, authors, and researchers and curated editorially. allcitiesarebeautiful.com does not operate as a static collection but as an open system, continually evolving and enabling new connections between its contents.
Two central principles guide allcitiesarebeautiful.com: on the one hand, the documentation of urban spaces through the collection of visual and textual works that reveal their spatial-material, social and symbolic-cultural significance as well as their transformation—such as the demolition, construction, or repurposing of buildings, changes in infrastructure, and the revaluation or reconfiguration of specific places—and, on the other hand, the creation of a discursive framework that opens up new contexts in which photographs, videos, and texts can be brought into relation with one another. The archive is therefore not conceived as a mere accumulative but as a system of statement formations that determines which perspectives on urban spaces become visible and within which frames they can be interpreted. Through its very structure—the division into interviews, projects, texts, and publications—an ordering system emerges that shapes perception and enables specific readings, while the editorial selection of contributions continuously negotiates not only which forms of urban spaces and which geographic locations are made visible but also how they are read, connected, and which mediating voices are heard and amplified.
At the same time, (urban) space is not conceived as a neutral backdrop but as the outcome of social practices, conflicts, and imaginations—producing, in the form of a cityscape, not only topographical configurations but also the social and cultural processes that shape them. Each visual or textual work within the archive thus also points to the practice of perceiving space (sensually, aesthetically, in the sense of seeing, observing, interpreting), of using and shaping it (through acting, transforming, rebuilding), of appropriating it, and of symbolically charging it—thereby assigning meaning. The photographs themselves are not presented merely as documents but as acts that open up relationships between photographer, depicted space, and viewer—that is, social relations. An image of a street or square, for example, can thus also become an entry point into questions of power, ownership, and belonging. In combination with interviews and texts, it becomes evident that photography does not simply represent but actively intervenes in social and political processes.
Unlike other platforms or social media, where the sheer volume of content inevitably causes individual contributions to lose visibility and significance, allcitiesarebeautiful.com follows a different logic: by collecting works within a clearly defined thematic field—urban spaces and their visual as well as textual reflections—meaning is generated precisely through quantity. This curated brute force archive does not rely on the representativeness of individual works—such as selecting a single image deemed typical or iconic to stand pars pro toto for something larger (a city or place)—but instead on repetition, variation, and density within the overall corpus. This approach shifts the epistemic logic of meaning: significance no longer arises from the interpretative elevation of individual works, which would establish a canonical view and reduce the diversity of possible perspectives to a few supposedly representative examples. Instead, meaning emerges from the statistical, cumulative structure of the archive itself, foregrounding density as a mode of knowledge production. The volume of contributions forms patterns, renders transformations visible, and creates a form of legibility that extends beyond any single work. What matters is no longer which document is chosen to stand for the whole, but whether it is recognised as belonging within the framework defined by the archive. In this sense, the archive reveals its character as a dispositif of inclusion and exclusion, as a political practice of making visible, and as a site of material excess in which the social relations of the city become tangible through their very density. This, too, constitutes a political gesture: it is not a single iconic image that shapes collective memory but the entirety of visual traces. Voices, places, and perspectives that would remain invisible within a classical canon become visible here precisely because they are part of the mass—meaning does not reside in a single image or viewpoint standing for the whole; the whole itself emerges only through the sum of all images.
In short, allcitiesarebeautiful.com generates meaning through quantity and context rather than by highlighting individual icons, following the idea that archives not only preserve but also produce new meanings through their very practice. In this sense, allcitiesarebeautiful.com positions itself as a living archive that, with each new publication, not only expands its holdings and thereby shifts the context of what already exists but also enhances the legibility of the works already present and, moreover, continually creating new connections between its contents and alternative approaches to urban spaces through its digital interface.
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