There is in the relationship between photography and urban territory an intimate reciprocity, a shared contemporary mentality, a historical equivalence that perhaps destined them to meet. Photography is bound to the city's process of construction and deconstruction, a kind of permanent vandalism that seems to want to auscultate and flay it at once in order to extract a memory. The three cities studied here, Marseille, Sarajevo and Odessa, reveal multiple temporalities, at once current and historical, resonating from an open fund of remembrance in which the tenuous, persistent memory of classical landscape painting and ancient tragedy mingles with the force of the contemporary documentary image.