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: Renoir
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
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.
Renoir’s Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise
Pierre Auguste Renoir. Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise. 1879. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. [Source: WebMuseum Paris] Alphonsine Fournaise was the woman in straw boater standing at the rail in the center of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Alphonsine is the subtle … Continue reading
Flânerie & Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Luncheon of the Boating Party. 1880–1881. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. [Source: Miss.Ramos.Science] In Susan Vreeland’s novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party, the character of actress Angèle Legault calls the throng of artist’s models together for their second sitting … Continue reading
