‘The street is the only region of valid experience’, according to Andre Breton in Najda, quoted by Matthew Beaumont in The Walker – On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020). I think this is pushing the perils and pleasures of the street a bit far, but one would expect no less from a Surrealist. Yet we live in surreal pandemic times and going out to take exercise, in the street for most people, has become one of the few valid experiences left.
‘No walk, as far as I am concerned, is ever wasted’, claims Beaumont, ‘In contrast…to a car journey’. Walking makes him feel alive and ‘vitally connected to the city’s ceaseless circuits of energy and, at the same time, delicately detached from them.’ There is no evidence that he’s anti-rural, that he doesn’t get emotional and spiritual strength from nature by walking in the countryside, he’s just exploring an alternative, one that happens to be literally on the doorstep.
EE sent me a delightful hand-drawn Christmas card with the encouraging message, ‘Trusting that you’re walking and making images’. Well, that’s what I’m doing. Regardless of the weather and at no particular time, I’m strolling the streets camera in hand from the same starting point, home, waiting to see what turns up and relying on the gift of serendipity. I’m not aiming for beautifully composed and exposed pictures. Perhaps some will be, perhaps most won’t. I want to explore the often messy nature of urban walking in the changeable dour months of winter that will transition into hopeful early spring. Maybe the pictures will also say something about the strange times in which we are living. Perhaps it will be a lockdown visual diary (though very different from my previous one, see Corona Diary, posted 15th September 2020).
I’m aware that there is nothing new conceptually in any of this. Sara Pomparelli runs a blog, ‘Walking Artists’, walkingartists.altervista.org. She says it’s: A blog about [t]he use of walk in art: from land art and conceptual art to street photography and the essay film, across the last four decades many artists have acted as explorers whether making their mark on the rural wilderness, documenting small journeys, or undertaking close examination of the urban environment around them. Walking artists uses strong but simple gestures, as walking, to evoke historical memory, highlighting social and economic tensions and class struggle or just to create a relationship between man and environmental space. In a word they make art. She features work by Sophie Calle, Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and a dozen others. I’m just using the approach in a particular place at a particular time.