Work In Progress: Lost and Found
Flâneur: "A person who walks the city in order to experience it".
Charles Baudelaire.
I am a stranger to London as a peripatetic wanderer. Like many visitors, I am only familiar with it as a series of disconnected zones and detached tube stations. I have wondered as a tourist through its most central areas, yet I have never managed to make sense of how it all fits together.
Like a guidebook of the overlooked and visually ordinary, this photographic walking project attempts to create a portrait of London from the perspective of a pedestrian, wandering amidst the flow of the daily routine. For each of the seven, daylong walks, I will randomly place a book upon a map of London and draw a line around it. I shall then walk the designated route whilst documenting my journey with photography. The chosen books have a connection with London's literary past and those writers who have used walking as an act of artistic inspiration.
Through photography I hope to decode some of the patterns that identify modern life in London. My photographic approach will draw attention to objects found in the city that are often ignored and have been disregarded or forgotten. I want to photograph what we don't usually want to photograph and by capturing these banal and non-decisive moments, we may be given a glimpse into an everyday reality that exists beyond the one we ordinarily experience. Ultimately, I hope that by studying these left behind items, we will be offered indexes to London's recent past and presented with clues about the people whom inhabit the city.
Now that all of the seven walks have been completed, I shall collate the images from each of the seven days into one final edit, creating the visualization of a week in one day.