About the Flaneur
![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]](../../wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a 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. Then stay tuned.Letting Go of Sight
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Media in Transition @ MiT
Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]
Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]
Tag Archives: Impressionists
Vincent Van Gogh and “Sacre Bleu”
Vincent Van Gogh. Self-Portrait (dedicated to Paul Gauguin). 1888. [Source: Wikipedia/NPR] Sacre Bleu | Defacing Fine Art Since 2011 Publisher’s website supporting the novel by Christopher Moore, with images of the paintings enlisted in the story… Art, Mystery And Posh … Continue reading
Renoir’s Gift For My Mother’s Birthday
Auguste Renoir. A Girl with a Watering Can. 1876. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. This was my mother’s most cherished painting at the National Gallery of Art. We viewed it together several times in my youth. When work took … Continue reading
Impression, Sunrise
Lake Ontario looked like this Monet painting yesterday morning before the fog burned off. When the atmospherics feel like this – when sky, wind, light and water match the scope of what remains of my eyesight — I could sit on the jetty for hours and never tire of looking at the lake.
Flaneur’s Gallery: Music in the Tuileries
Édouard Manet. Music in the Tuileries. Oil on canvas, 1862. National Gallery, London [Source: Wikipedia] I believe the fashionable Flaneur in top hat at the left edge of Manet’s painting is the poet Charles Baudelaire.
Flaneur’s Gallery: Renoir in the 20th Century
Gabrielle Renard was more than the Renoir family’s nanny. She was the painter’s model and muse late in life as he turned away from the Impressionist style he had helped to create. Renoir painted Gabrielle many times. Some of the portraits, including Gabrielle With A Rose, are gathered in Renoir in the 20th Century, now on exhibit at the Los Angles County Museum of Art.
