reaffirmed as materials that would show posterity what the city used to look like. But the city depicted in these black-and-white photographs – the information they offer us today – can largely be reduced to the city’s physical structures; to its paving, its asphalt, and its bricks.
Users’ own images Most of the images uploaded by users also depict the public urban space. But they do so in different ways from the ones we are used to seeing at the museum. The user-generated images are almost all taken by amateurs, and most of them represent contemporary life. The users’ images have been taken and shared as part of today’s digital culture where documenting your everyday life has become standard practice. That practice can be viewed as a radical democratisation of the photograph as a medium; a new departure after the so-called Kodak era where most amateur snapshots were taken in connection with special events and ended up in the family photo album.2 Today, almost everyone in the Western world take photographs of a much wider field of activities, and sharing images with a broad circle of friends – or even strangers – has become a widespread practice. This cultural development is reflected on the WALL. The many images of street art and graffiti uploaded to the WALL showcases our contemporary digital culture. Here, digitally created photographs are taken and shared at the very moment the event takes place before the camera, and many of the users’ images document ephemeral and transient events in the city. Illegal ornamentation of the public space is a controversial issue and is hotly debated on the WALL. However, there can be no doubt that it is a significant cultural trend in modern cities. Nevertheless, the Museum of Copenhagen has not yet allocated resources to documenting and collecting examples of graffiti. Now, with the WALL as their platform, public users are well on their way to performing that task themselves.
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SARAH GIERSING