My diary in photographs
When I took the photograph I thought the woman was one of the flaneurs who had gathered at Piccadilly Circus.
And she could be, and very probably is – but she has a camera, and a good one. So maybe she was a photographer and not a flaneur. Or both, a person can be both.
There is no collective noun for flaneur.
It is not surprising. The archetype flaneur is a solitary observer of the human condition.
What would happen if two flaneur dressed so similarly that they might be twins, and then met by chance?
Would they bridle? Would they laugh at the unlikeliness of it? I can almost guarantee that they would laugh together because that is part and parcel of being a flaneur.
The detached observer has a sense of humour. If he or she were to find the proceedings too meaningful, then they might become involved.
Theodor Herzl wrote for a newspaper – elegant essays observing society – until the antisemitism that began in France and spread to Germany took him on a different course.
Oscar Wilde was a flaneur (as Tamara told me when we were discussing the archetype). I said I thought differently because of x and y.
She is right; at one time Wilde was the quintessential flaneur in his observations and in his dress. And he says so himself.
When he was sentenced to two years hard labour for gross indecency, and was transferred to Reading Gaol, he wrote De Profundis, a letter to the young man who was a trigger to his downfall.
…The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.
Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it…
I have been shooting with Nikon D3000, but I have also looking at the photographs I took in India in 2010 with the D60, the D3000’s close sibling.
First I ran this image – of a family at Agra zoo – through DxO PureRaw 4.
DxO PureRaw 4 pulls out a lot of detail. It does a good job and gives a certain crispness to the processed images.
Then, because the pixel count of the D60 is quite low compared to today’s cameras, I used the Neural AI feature in Photoshop to increase the size of the image using smart technology.
And I think it is pretty good – and shows what can be pulled out of a camera that was released eighteen years ago.
The pixel count on the D3000 is the same as the D60, and what I would really like is an automation that will run the RAW conversion and the up-sizing with one click.
My guess is that it is possible using the built-in Automator application on my Mac. Whether I can program it is a different matter.
He’s from NJ and lives in Nuremberg and feels at home in the clothing of the ’30s through to the ’50s when things were a bit more analogue.
Shot with Fuji X100F
A flâneur is someone who wanders without a specific destination, acting as a detached, philosophical observer of modern life, crowds, and society.
Nothing in that definition explicitly says that such a person has to dress in a particular way. And yet the notion goes hand in hand with someone who cares about their dress, and may well feel more at home in a more analogue time. A more analogue time’ was how a flaneur described it to me during the walk of the flaneurs.
The gathering began at Covent Garden and went in procession to Piccadilly Circus.
The man in black on the right in the photo above reminds me of a European version of Oddjob from the Bond film, Goldfinger.
The flaneurs walk was well publicised, and lots of photographers showed up at Covent Garden to shoot the participants.
And now I’ll sum up what I like to photograph and what I don’t like to photograph.
If I strike up a conversation with someone. then I might want to take their photograph, and when that happens, I like the process. There is a tension, something ineffable in the interaction.
What I don’t like to do, generally, unless I am really struck by someone, is to photograph strangers who pose where there is no setup.
My mind takes a dark turn with shades of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
At the flaneurs walkabout yesterday, I could feel myself being swept up in the mood of other photographers.
And it took willpower to identify what I like to do versus the general mood.
I would rather the people I photograph were involved in something and I photograph them doing whatever it is.
These two gentlemen noticed me and asked whether I would photograph them. The gentleman with the top hat handed me an iPhone and instructed me that they wanted to be photographed with the statue of Eros between them. Of course I said yes, thinking that my friendly demeanour must have outweighed the impression created by the North Face shell jacket I was wearing.
They are so over the top, but I like it – from the man’s straw boater to his shoes and socks.
It’s funny how thoughts flit across the mind in the crush of events. I wondered whether that is her hair, or a wig.
And now I see that, as Tamara told me recently, she is wearing a fascinator – a kind of non-hat decorated with feathers, or similar.
