#Flâneurs

[ensoledadminido]

Edgardo Scott

[flaneuresse]

untitled by dailydoseofjess on Flickr.

[is-the-19thcentury-man-okay]

Rating: CUTE!

This street-wise flâneur of mid-century is doing what he does best: classic flânerie including fashionably strolling about in an ostentatious manner, smoking a cigar, and perhaps expressing a form of protest against bourgeois norms through "a counter-doctrine of inefficiency and uselessness — of which their flânerie was merely the most performative, emblematic expression."

This could be problem behaviour in some 19th century men, but the Parisian flâneur is only expressing natural instincts. Charles Baudelaire was an authority on this type of man, whom he called l'observateur passionné. Gavarni also sketched a flâneur.

[clove-pinks]

Can't stop thinking about Achille de Gas in this portrait by his older brother—no longer a baby midshipman but all grown up in c. 1868-1872.

The description from the Minneapolis Institute of Art calls Achille a "dapper flâneur", but it's also hilariously critical of him:

Achille himself was something of a pretentious do-nothing, frequently running up debts and engaging in scandalous behavior. (He shot and wounded the husband of a former lover in front of the Paris stock exchange.)

[Edgar] Degas portrays Achille leaning on an umbrella, twisting his hip and pushing his chest forward to emphasize the studied nonchalance of his half-buttoned coat. The sketch is a study for the male spectator in the foreground of the painting At the Races. With eyes downcast and striking a self-consciously debonair pose, the fellow is clearly more interested in being seen than in the action behind him.

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Maison Flâneur

[less-ismore]

Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Flânerie 2.0., 2018.

[walker-diaries]

[priest-iuput]

A new visual language

[ms-myself]

J’ai couru, dit la petite vieille, en déposant son sac. J’avais tellement hâte d’arriver. C’est bien vrai ce que tu m’as écrit dans ta lettre?

— Bien sûr, dit l’autre. Tu vas voir par toi-même. Viens.

Elle ouvre la porte de la petite cour.

Et les deux amies regardent le lilas qui a refleuri encore une fois !

[flaneuresse]

rome by jessica on Flickr.

[monstrouscrew]

our suggested posts on insta: dolls, monster high dolls, ooak, monster high dolls... Will f*king Ramos 😆😆😆

(we swear we really didn't like the band 'nough. zuckerbrains, more marine life, please)

[gravalicious]

Sabelo Mlangeni, Coming to Johannesburg I, January 2011.

Source: Jackie Higgins and Max Kozloff - The World Atlas of Street Photography (2014: 236)

[spectre-ship]

considering followup projects; I have some different fabrics I wanna work with. currently thinking I'll start off making a work blouse with oatmeal linen, something like these examples from the Merchant Tailor Museum:

albeit one with a rectangular body and off-the-shoulder gathered sleeve, so that I don't have to worry about drafting a curve for the armscye (I've seen examples of work blouses with sleeves like that in ambrotypes and daguerreotypes.) so it will be a bit of a weird cross between features from different examples of the same kind of garment, but certainly still nothing beyond imagining.

[foundationsofdecay]

Plini - Flâneur

[grandhotelabyss]

Why does walking help with thinking and writing? Also, do you consider yourself a flâneur?

While one could no doubt quote Rousseau or Thoreau or Nietzsche here, I believe the answer is as simple as moving the body also moves the mind. There's something about being physically but not mentally occupied that helps you think, which is why ideas also come in the shower or while washing the dishes. And walking in a landscape full of significance, whether artificial or natural, can't help but stimulate thought. I have no head for birds or flowers—I am a human-focused writer—so I like a good urban walk where you wonder what that strange sad person's story is or what goes on in that little dress shop on that narrow street or who lives above that grimy-looking pizza place and can they smell the food.

I refer to myself as a flâneur with parodic exaggeration, but I don't really consider myself one. It's not so much about who I am as about where I am. Certainly I am an idler, a stroller, a layabout on walkabout searching for aesthetic interest and that fleeting vitality Baudelaire described as the essence of the modern. However, the concept of the flâneur includes the idea of walking with no purpose, which I think must also imply a genuine risk of getting lost. To be a true flâneur you need a city big or labyrinthine enough to get lost in—a London, Paris, Tokyo, New York—whereas I have done all my urban ambling in Pittsburgh and Minneapolis, cities you can circumambulate on foot in an afternoon.

(You can do the same in Dublin, raising the question of whether or not Ulysses is a flâneur novel. I think not. Stephen has aspirations to such status, cultivated in fin-de-siècle Paris, but Bloom's earthier urban appetites—not for the Baudelaire-style sex worker Gothicized into daemon or vampire or for the opium passport to glamorously lethal Cythera, but merely to get a glance at the neighbor lady's slip and to eat a gorgonzola sandwich—work against the concept's potential aesthetic preciousness.)

[s2z]

Preston, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 2022-12-30 16:29:33 by stuart murdoch Via Flickr: Walking to a friends house for drinks. One of several projects, that explore photography as evidence amongst other ideas. Blog | Tumblr | Website | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | pixelfed.social | glass | grainary | vero | hipstamatic