![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. ![President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990 as Justin Dart looks on. [Source: ucp.org]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ada_signing_072690_ucp_2.jpg "ada_signing_072690_ucp_2")
![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in 
3
December 6, 2009 at 3:45pm
by Mark Willis 
This site crossed a quantitative threshold last night when it surpassed 250,000 page views. It was almost two years to the day when I installed the WordPress.com stat counter to measure Internet traffic here, and a little more than seven months since the count reached 100,000. On that occasion I reposted Degas’s Spartan Girls Provoking Boys, which remains the most viewed page on the site (18,718 and counting. I’m celebrating today with the legendary Kiki of Montparnasse, who posed for Man Ray’s iconic 1924 photo montage, Le Violin de Ingres. This image was first posted on February 6, 2008; with 14,982 page views, it’s giving Spartan Girls a run for the money.
I harbor no illusions about what all this means. It’s a nice round number, but 250,000 page views are not 250,000 pages read. The lion’s share of these page views were images such as Spartan Girls and Le Violin de Ingres that turned up in Google Image search results. In that respect, Google has been good to me. Very little of the vast and sundry things I choose to write about would ever make it to the first page of web search results without an image.
No one ever questioned why or how a blind flaneur could produce web pages showcasing such images. It didn’t happen by accident or irony. It doesn’t represent “leakage” in some categorical imperative separating sight and blindness, as a scholar of visual culture once suggested to me. I’ve done a lot of photo editing throughout a forty-year media career, and the Internet continues to expand my ability to pursue the work even as I lose sight. It could be that this blog is documenting a process of perception and attention that will culminate someday in a final image, the last one I manage to see. But, honestly, I intend it to document a different process, an evolution into another understanding of what an image is and can be. Take a look at this blog’s very first post: Walter Benjamin pointed the way in his essay “The Return of the Flaneur” when he spoke of the flaneur as curator of images and the genius loci.
Those of you who have followed the blog may have noticed that its appearance has changed significantly in recent months. My posting has become erratic, too. This happened as the result of a WordPress security problem that began last July, which I have been fighting ever since. The hacking shows up as hidden code that’s aimed at scamming the Googlebot. Fortunately, my readers haven’t seen it unless they examine source code. I had to drop the outdated and vulnerable Moonlight theme that once graced the site’s design, even though it enabled me to better view the images. Fighting the hack has consumed much of the creative time and energy that otherwise would have gone into new content. There have been times when I was so discouraged that I thought I might just take the site down, but its web traffic has continued to grow despite the hack, and 250,000 hits tell me to hang on. Something is working right.
3 Comments
#1. Sara H 12.06.2009
Oh, do hang on! Terrible that someone wants to stop your blogging. I am quite interested in how you manage to do so much with photos despite your impaired vision. And it’s no small feat to publicize Man Ray in this day and age! Would be ok to see a bit of the real Ingres too…
Thanks for your persistence! I must read Walter Benjamin. Hope I can find his stuff for less than a fortune…
#2. a blind flaneur 12.08.2009
[...] Kiki of Montparnasse to Kiki of the Jardin des Plantes… sad news comes from Paris via Lizzy Davis at guardian.com: [...]
#3. Mark Willis 12.08.2009
Thanks for the encouragement, Sara. I posted Benjamin’s essay, The Return of the Flaneur, for you to read.
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