I’ve always been a wannabe flaneur, that meandering gent who had a moment in mid-19th century Paris. My parents had that effect on me. My mother was the quintessential busy flaneur. Always on the go with museums, friends, countries to visit. She frequently fled our home in the burbs for New York City with me as her plus one. NYC was her happy place and she made damn sure it would be mine.
One of those excursions was particularly transformative. In 1972, my mother took me to the Diane Arbus’ post-suicide retrospective at MOMA. Throngs lined up to take in the exhibit. Apparently, a few people were so appalled they spat on the images. If I had spat on them it would have been a salute, a desire to connect with Arbus and her menagerie of transvestites, dwarves, nudists.
It was Arbus that first sparked my passion for documentary photography and eventually shooting. There was nothing conventionally pretty about her images and those of other photographers I’ve grown to love. That wasn’t the point. It was the deeply personal magic of an encounter, the perfect confluence of elements within the frame. The critic and essayist Susan Sontag derided the flaneur photographer “stalking, cruising the urban [or rural] inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers…a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” But where Sontag and others saw exploitation, I saw empathy and appreciation. We’re all kind of misfits and outsiders seeking connection in one form or another. This brand of photography was, for me, a spiritual and optimistic act of engaging the world.
In 1988, I took a job in Knoxville, Tennessee, as much for my fledgling career in media as for my desire to capture the America that had inspired my heroes: Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank and my spirit animal, Garry Winogrand. I convinced the local alternative paper to create its version of Sylvia Platchy’s “Unguided Tour,” a photo series that ran for years in the Village Voice. The result was “Seen Not Seen,” a weekly column I shot for four years. They paid me $25 a photo but I would have paid them. It was a period of daily wandering, hunting for something or some person out of my ordinary.
My dear friend and tireless photographer-creator, Robert Palumbo, often counseled me to keep my gaze inward, toward family. My mother complained, the irony was not lost on her, that my unflattering photos of her were “Arbus-like.” My child, Nemo, an unpredictable wildling from the moment they arrived, has been a frequent muse. Of course, many wonderful photographers—Tina Barney, David Sultan, Gillian Laub, among others—understood the anthropological charms of the worlds we’re born into.
My “flaneur-ing” is now sporadic at best. The pandemic—and its accompanying dread—reignited a fertile period of shooting, but I no longer carry my hefty Nikon with me everywhere. I still see the moments and close my eyes to make a negative imprint on the back of my lids. I’m still blown away by the masters of this genre (up yours, Sontag!). Stacy Kranitz is a recent and exciting find. I want to be cremated holding Josef Koudelka’s “Exiles” and be bemused in the afterlife by Garry Winogrand. Hats off to all the flaneurs who show up, camera at the ready, and shoot, shoot, shoot (and I mean you, Palumbo).
