Walter Benjamin’s figure of the strolling flâneur is a multivarinate one that is linked to a rethinking of history, cultural memory, and the changing conditions and media of cultural and historical transmission under capital. On one side is the flâneur as incognito, the hidden observer, the philosophical promenader who brings the present to the level of reflective consciousness. On the other side is the flâneur as a bohemian social outcast, the poet-ragpicker, poet-prostitute, poet-pariah of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal — ‘the werewolf roaming a social wilderness.’

Benjamin draws a distinction between the flâneur in Paris, the home of the anachronistic flâneur whose habitat was the 19th century arcades and Berlin. The specificity of the latter for Benjamin, lies in the fact that he strolls through a very familiar city, one in which he grew up in and which the flâneur observes in a different way. It is not the foreigner’s perception of the city, which is centred on surfaces: the impressionistic, the exotic and the picturesque. Rather it is a deeper perception of the native in the childhood city who journeys into the past, links the personal to the collective, avoids the popular attractions and follows the streets that evoke a remembering of one’s past as well as the city’s historical signifiers.

Photography on poodlewalks wandering the back streets of 21st century Adelaide reworks the figure of of the strolling flâneur or wandering, observant after modernism. It is a visual strolling, a getting lost in the city transfoming into a post-industrial city with the photographer flâneur being viewed as a troubling figure regarded with suspicion, if not hostility. The “street” photographer as flâneur is seen as invading people’s private space. The flâneur photographer has become a stranger and a suspicious person who idly loiters on the city streets. This links back to the classic European understanding of the flâneur as a figure of alienation.  

Drews’ mug shot posters refer to criminality in 1920s Adelaide and the illegality of street art in 2011. These resonated as photographers were seen by security guards as possible terrorists and they were hassled and threatened by them and the police. The flâneur photographer is on a threshold — between past and present and in the midst of the crowd and on the margins.

Flânerie is usually associated with the detached literary observation in the literary tradition rather than the photographic one, even though Baudelaire, alongside other literary figures, emphasized the creative and expressive potential of flânerie.  The following literary texts come to mind: Charles Baudelaire (The Painter of Modern Life), Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life) Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project), modernist writers such as James Joyce ( Ulysses), Virginia Woolf (Mrs Daloway), Christopher Isherwood (Goodby to Berlin), Jean Rhys (Good Morning Midnight), Guy Debord and the French Situationists with their concepts of the dérive and psychogeography, Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life 1984), W.G. Sebald (The Rings of Saturn 1995 and Austerlitz 2001) and Iain Sinclair (London Orbital, 2002).

Flânerie and the photographic and cinematic remains in the background even though the handheld camera had become an important tool for the street photographer, a modern extension of Benjamin’s urban observer. The cinematic is more known—eg., Dziga Vertov experimental masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Patrick Keiller’s’ London(1994) and the two sequels, Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins(2010) that show the further changes in the city and beyond, and which reflect on the economic inequalities that have been thrown up by neoliberal development.

It is with Isherwood where photography and flânerie are successfully combined. Isherwood’s ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’, which aligns with Benjamin’s philosophy of the photographic image as a technology for organizing experience in modernity. Isherwood was working with a new kind of situated documentary objectivity to capture the staggering overabundance of metropolitan sensory input, one which will require all this to be developed, carefully printed, fixed’. In Isherwood’s aesthetic representation of the city of Berlin: photography (freezing the metropolis) and urban flânerie (watching from a distance) are melded in one snapshot gaze with a political awareness about homosexuality and Nazism.

Susan Sontag in approaching photography from a fundamentally literary perspective argued in On Photography (p. 55) that:

“Gazing on other people’s reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends class interests, as if its perspective is universal. In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’”

From this perspective it is Garry Winogrand who emerges as the photographer of modern life in New York with poetic notion of an art of urban observation and fleeting impressions of the modern metropolis. Winogrand defined a new poetics of alertness to public space.

William Klein (New York, Rome and Moscow) and Daido Moriyama’s photographs of Tokyo (Japan: A Photo Theatre,) Klein’s Japanese contemporary, embody the art of flânerie, as a form of urban spectatorship and exploration of the city. Klein experimented to a great extend with a sort of “trashy”, or maybe just honest, way of expressing “city life” with its blurry, close ups, high contrast and 'in-your-face' approach. His lack of perfection and polished finish of his visual language seems to find its inspiration in the actual torn posters one sees on walls in the streets of big cities. Similarly Moriyama’s visual language is one of fragments reality that work with closeups and blurs, sometimes to the point of abstraction. His emphasis is randomness, chance, and improvisation, as he takes his images on the fly, without framing or composition.

,