George Caleb Bingham. The Jolly Flatboatmen in Port. 1857. Oil on canvas. St. Louis Art Museum.
curating an archaeology of attention & culture
I walk through my blindness the way I saunter down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, enchanted and engaged by the raw material of the senses. I am a blind flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. If you don’t find me on the street, take a look in the Fair Use Lab. You can browse the archives or contact me.
In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in New York, the social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it. Paul Strand probably didn’t give her much credit for making culture, either. Read more: Curiosity & The Blind Photographer [MiT5 2007] See more on blind photographers.
What is a village? A small place, yes, as wide as the world, layered with histories and stories, where you can walk wherever you want to go. My vision of that place is Yellow Springs 2.0.
© 2010 a blind flaneur.
Moonlight theme by Blaze New Media
2 Comments
#1. AndyJ 08.09.2023
I hope the paucity of comments doesn’t suggest that nobody’s following you. These images are brilliant, thanks for sharing them.
#2. Mark Willis 08.09.2023
Thanks, Andy. Comments are over-rated as a metric of value. The BBC producer who interviewed me in June, for example, read the blog but didn’t leave a comment here.
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