This essay examines photography and visual art as critical tools for understanding contemporary urban conflict, marginality, and collective memory. Centred on the recurring question “Who do cities belong to?”, it connects historical moments of urban protest, from Paris in 1968 to anti-tourism graffiti in Barcelona and Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Portland, with the ways cities become stages for social claims, rebellion, and symbolic repair.
The text focuses first on Carrie Mae Weems’s documentation of plywood barriers erected during the 2020 Portland protests. These defensive panels, initially intended to protect shops and offices from damage, are reinterpreted as temporary public canvases carrying graffiti, murals, erasures, and political lament. Through Weems’s photographic gaze, these ephemeral surfaces gain archival and aesthetic value, preserving civic anger even when the original images are painted over or destroyed. The essay situates this work within a longer artistic tradition of testimony and accusation, invoking Goya, Picasso, Chillida, and Malevich to show how images of suffering and protest endure as collective memory.
The second part turns to Miyamoto Ryūji’s Cardboard Houses, presented through Mengfei Pan’s reading of improvised shelters built by people excluded from the formal city. Here, the city’s fissures, waste materials, and marginal spaces become the ground for fragile forms of survival. Unlike the painted plywood of Portland, these cardboard structures are not conceived aesthetically; their purpose is protection and persistence. Yet Miyamoto’s photographs reveal their symbolic force, making visible those whom urban systems tend to erase.
Together, the works discussed suggest that photography transforms temporary, marginal, or disposable urban traces into enduring acts of witness. The essay argues that cities are layered, contested, and continuously remade by protest, exclusion, memory, and survival. Ultimately, it asks readers to reconsider urban belonging and to recognize visual documentation as a powerful means of preserving marginalized urban voices.