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July 28, 2007
Does street photography revive the old notion of the flaneur, the amateur but always interested stroller of the streets of Paris, celebrated by Baudelaire and, a century later, by Walter Benjamin?
Baudelaire understood this in the following terms: “And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call Modernity.”
But we are no longer searching for the quality of modernity. Rather we are concerned more with understanding our history:
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Town Hall, Sydney, 2007
The whole Walter Benjamin flaneur thing has always made a lot of sense to me. The collage, the standing around on street corners, the notion of losing one's self in cities, and what he describes as the 'shock of the crowd'. All that makes sense to me. And looking closely at the remnants of commerce, and at places like shopping malls.
Adelaide is still a city that hasn't (yet) been subjected to a corporate makeover that expresses the triumphalist view of urban history as an upward trajectory toward the paradise of capitalism. Darling Harbour in Sydney is an example.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, magistrates Court, Adelaide, 2007
So Adelaide provides us with the space for a complex, subjective, Benjaminian evocation of the layers of urban life, without viewing the fabric of everyday urban life through the oily haze of a deadening nostalgia celebrated by National Trust.
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