Psychogeography in Adelaide
Leigh St, Adelaide
The figure of the flâneur be adapted from the nineteenth century’s dandy figure in Paris to the wandering photographer in 20th century Adelaide through the concept of psychogeography. This reworks the dandy’s ambling through the Paris arcades with a citywide rambling with its inadvertent poetry of shop window displays, fleeting glances, chance encounters, and mysterious pursuits.
As we have seen in a previous post Walter Benjamin in the early twentieth-century turned to Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur in Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) as a starting point for an exploration of the impact of modern city life upon the human psyche in his The Arcades Project. This strolling spectator, who is an anguished urbanite in retreat from the city’s inhospitable environment and threatening crowds, collects mental notes taken on leisurely city walks and transcribes them into written form. Benjamin in his Arcades book writes as a flâneur: unearthing the rags, the refuse of society from his extensive reading, and cutting and pasting from all manner of sources into the text of the Arcades Project.
The flâneur in nineteenth century Paris was a self-contained, leisurely but vigiilant stroller with a male gaze: an figure anachronistic figure closely linked to the architectural features of the Parisian arcades. That the arcades of Paris were long past their heyday in the early twentieth century was was a key aspect of Benjamin’s view that all characteristics of modernity were a transitory phenomena. In walking the urban space of modernity the flâneur is forever looking to the past. He reverts to his memory of the city and rejects the self-enunciative authority of any technically reproduced image.
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin puts forward two complementary concepts to explain our human response to modern city life. Erlebnis can be characterised as the shock-induced anaesthesia brought about by the overwhelming sensory bombardment of life in a modern city, somewhat akin to the alienated subjectivity experienced by a worker bound to his regime of labour. Erfahrung is a more positive response and refers to the mobility, wandering or cruising of the flâneur; the unmediated experience of the wealth of sights, sounds and smells the city has to offer.
detritus
In the twentieth century the photographer adopts the practice of flânerie: walking in the margins of industrial capitalist society, looking at the refuse or detritus and creating snapshot images of ephemera from the everyday to be rearticulated as art or literature. The tendency of the flâneur towards detached but culturally aware observation has clear links to photography, particularly the type of urban street photography that became widespread during the early twentieth-century. The street photographer can be seen as a modern extension of Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century urban observer
In London Orbital, Iain Sinclair introduces the notion of 'eye-swiping' -- scanning the urban landscape for creative material for artistic or literary re-articulation. If photography presents itself as the ideal technology for eye-swiping, then its depiction of what the flâneur sees on the streets is not a copy as it is mediated by memory and history as understood by the tradition of photographers like Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, André Kertész, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson and Mark Strizic. The photographer becomes a visual artist of the modern life drifting or wandering through the industrial city of Adelaide as a rag picker, moving through the urban streets as scavenger, collecting, rereading and rewriting its history.
Gouger St, 2012
From the archive of photos I attempt to reassemble them into an order —the creative process is a dérive (casual urban walks), photographs, blog (as a bricolage or scrapbook) -- then at some later date, a book. It is done at a time when the visual culture of consumer society has become a spectacle in which the power of the hegemonic advertising images have a dreamlike quality and a capacity to link commodities with human desires and imagination. As Virginia Woolf realized a series of pictures, arranged in a carefully considered way, could help present a fully-fledged narrative.
Photography like cinema is bound up with flânerie, modernism and the city with its multiple perspectives, accelerated rhythms and multi-layered temporality.