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]
Category Archives: Ie
Imaging Paris: Pont des Arts
Pont des Arts Paris. Watercolor by deneux_jacques. Thanks to deneux_jacques for sharing this image in the Creative Commons. See his superb photo set, Ah, Paris! Imaging Paris documents places in the city and the images that inhabit them. “Just as … Continue reading
Fashionista Street: Arachnophilia 1
[Photo by Bill Cunningham/NYT] Bill Cunningham’s latest On The Street photo essay returns to Paris. “Many members of the fashion world at the recent Paris shows,” he says, “seemed to pay homage to the look of a Louise Bourgeois spider … Continue reading
Fashionista Street: Arachnophilia 2
[Photo by Bill Cunningham/NYT] Bill Cunningham’s latest On The Street photo essay returns to Paris. “Many members of the fashion world at the recent Paris shows,” he says, “seemed to pay homage to the look of a Louise Bourgeois spider … Continue reading
Imaging Paris: In a Stations of the Metro
[Photo by zola’s box] In a Station of the Metro (1913) The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Ezra Pound [Photo by Heliann]
Return of the Flaneur: Galerie Vivienne
When I’m in Paris I cross the river at least once to walk up Rue Vivienne, which runs north from the Louvre and Palais Royale. Compared to the grand boulevards, Rue Vivienne feels like a narrow, unassuming street, but it … Continue reading
