It is strangely fortuitous that Matthew Beaumont’s book, The Walker, should appear in the year 2020, the year in which a global health emergency undermines his call to action, namely that we reclaim the streets of our modern cities as creative spaces for walking. I call it fortuitous in a backhanded way because, although the Covid-19 pandemic undermined his call to action, it also had the unanticipated effect of demonstrating the validity of his claims about the political dimension of walking.
Ostensibly, Beaumont’s book is a survey of late Victorian and early Modernist literary figures who were either renowned urban walkers or incorporated accounts of walking in their writing. The earliest writer in his survey is Edgar Allen Poe whose short story, “The Man of the Crowd” is the occasion for the first of Beaumont’s wide-ranging literary meanders whose style perfectly reflects the roaming aleatory sensibility he wishes to promote. It’s also telling that he opens, not with Poe’s writing, or with any writing, for that matter, but with a good look at the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. While he makes no great thing of it, Beaumont’s work has about it the whiff of the synaesthetic, and if you spend any time at all on this web site, you will find that synaesthetic experience lies at the centre of how I encounter the world. By a tiny associative leap, I found myself thinking that Beaumont’s analysis could just as easily apply to visual media. This could be a book by Geoff Dyer leading us through a survey of pioneering street photographers from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand to Vivian Meyer and Joel Meyerowitz and leaving us with more contemporary purveyors of the medium like Zoe Strauss and Matt Stuart.
Walking As Resistance
The reason for the easy transferability to street photography has something to do with the way Beaumont understands the walker’s relationship to the urban landscape. Street photographers intuitively follow Beaumont’s prescription. They have to; otherwise they wouldn’t make any decent images. Most city walkers are creatures of our late capitalist economy and their walking reflects the utilitarian nature of their existence. Most walking is directed, purposive. The walk never begins unless the end has already been determined. Google Maps is emblematic of this: enter your beginning and your end, then click “directions” and Google will calculate the most efficient route. All time en route is wasted time, a transaction cost to be billed to a client or an externality to be foisted on someone else the same way garbage is foisted on the environment. Beaumont conceives of walking—at least as expressed by his author/heroes—as an act of resistance insofar as it fails to conform to the imperatives of our late capitalist economy. It has no preconceived end, motivated instead by pleasure and curiosity and the creative stimulus it provokes.
As an alternative way of thinking about our relationship to the streets, Beaumont draws on Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in which she uses the need for a new pencil as the pretext to wander through the streets of London one evening. In order to redeem the streets and to subvert those forces that would alienate us from them, we need to “haunt” the streets. Beaumont observes: “In order to make [the streets] accountable to those who inhabit them rather than those who seek to monetize them, we need both to frequent them as familiar places and, like spectres, to disturb them and make them seem unfamiliar.” I would suggest to my fellow street photographers that one of the ways we can disturb the streets is with our cameras. We can challenge increased policing and surveillance by “watching the watchmen”. We can document unjust distributions of wealth and the disposability of a certain class of humans. We can use cameras to ask awkward questions of power.
In his introduction, Beaumont also makes an observation that is obvious to any experienced street photographer: “If you wander around the city, or hang about at street corners, things happen.” Ironic as it may seem, loitering is the path to participation. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has produced a situation reminiscent of certain Ray Bradbury stories like his novel, Fahrenheit 451, and his short story, “The Pedestrian,” in which loitering is frowned upon or perhaps even unlawful. Lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have meant that, at various times in many urban locations, people have only been permitted to walk through the streets if they can demonstrate that their walking is necessary. It has produced a self-conscious manner of walking. We wonder if authorities will question the validity of our walking. Will other citizens snitch on us if they think we’re merely walking for pleasure or worse, simply loitering? The pandemic has given us an unpleasant taste of what it must be like to live in an authoritarian state. And it has demonstrated that walking bears as much importance as speech in the expression of our freedom.
A Chance Encounter
But the day arrives when public health departments lift their restrictions and we are free again to walk without purpose. I take up my camera and begin to drift through the city. As Beaumont suggests, just by hanging out, things happen. On a Saturday afternoon, I find myself in a colonnade of metal columns and glass immediately across from the St. Regis Hotel. I’ve had it in mind to make some kind of perspective image along the columns, small people in the distance, all of it doubled in the glass, but I’ve never been able to make it work to my satisfaction. So I lean against one of the columns and stare at the scene and look at things through my viewfinder. Just stare and think about it.
I hear a voice behind me and footsteps approaching. I turn and a homeless man stops beside me, maybe 40 or 45 (it’s difficult to tell because living rough can make you age faster). He’s my height although slightly slimmer in the shoulders, and definitely more hirsute with a full head of hair and a full scraggly beard. He asks if I know Billy Joel. He has specific lyrics in mind. He speaks in a flat tone, with a blunted affect, and I wonder, after the fact, if maybe he’s on the autism spectrum. Hard to say, during a brief encounter, but there seems to be a lack of emotional engagement—with anything. Billy Joel was fine, he says, but he turned his life to shit later on. Maybe Springsteen is the better example. (I’m not sure what Springsteen is supposed to be an example of, but it’s not as if this guy is defending a thesis.) He seemed to keep his shit together even though he made a shitload of money. I mention that Springsteen wrote a song about making a shitload of money, but I can’t remember the song or the lyrics until I get home (“Ain’t Got You” which is the first track on Tunnel of Love).
From there, the conversation takes a turn to the paranoid with talk of Wall Street—some new idea everybody is talking about and which he assumes I understand because, well, I’m white. It really all began after the war with Ian Fleming and the Jews. And then there’s Stephen Spielberg. You know, there are the smart Jews and then there are the greedy Jews. Spielberg is one of the smart ones. (I’m still trying to wrap my head around the news that Ian Fleming was Jewish, not that this matters to the narrative.) I’m not quite sure what it is that Ian Fleming and Stephen Spielberg are supposed to have done with their movies (Ian Fleming was dead for most of his), but whatever it is, it has derailed all of western culture, or something. Then there’s women. The problem with the world now is that women started to work and now they have too much money. Goddam. Then he stops talking. Well, he says. And he walks away.
I didn’t intend to ask if I could photograph him because, to be honest, once he started talking, he struck me as a little bit scary. But on an impulse, I call out and ask if he’d mind me taking a photo. I reason that if he’s going to make me stand there and listen to his anti Semitic misogynistic crap, then the least he can do by way of compensation is give me a decent photo. He says sure so I take a couple bursts and end up with a few images where the focus on his eyes is absolutely crisp. And I love the glassy background. And I do think the portrayal captures the absence of affect, the sense that he could have beaten me to a pulp if he wanted to and it wouldn’t have elevated his heart rate a single beat.
When I pull my eye from the viewfinder and nod, he turns without a word and ambles along the colonnade until he becomes a tiny figure in the distance. Ghostlike. Haunting the streets, but maybe not in the manner Matthew Beaumont might suppose.
Avoiding a Pothole
Although Beaumont doesn’t devote a chapter to the Paris Surrealists of the 1920’s, he does give them a mention in his Introduction and, in so doing, skirts dangerously close to a manner of thinking about those who live on the streets that we would do well to quash. He writes: “The street redeems everyone. Indeed, its least bourgeois inhabitants, the bohemians, bums and criminals, are for Breton and the other surrealists its saints and martyrs.” I give Beaumont the benefit of the doubt by presuming that this is indirect quotation. These sentiments belong not to him but to Andre Breton and to his peers. Strangely, these early modernist writers had a tendency to mirror the prevailing attitudes of their contemporary religious institutions: poverty is a blessèd state that can lead to a spiritual redemption. This attitude allowed the religious (and the Surrealists) to gloss over the fact that, almost invariably, poverty is the result of unjust social relations. Through cruelly interpreted scriptural passages (like “the poor will always be with you”), the religious serve as lackeys to the powerful. In secular circles, the avant-garde has performed the same function, substituting hackneyed aesthetic claims for scriptural snippets as their way of rationalizing degrees of misery that should never go unchallenged. Instead of a blessèd spiritual state, the secular aesthete want images of the streets to conform to a rough beauty.
I confess that, as a street photographer, I sometimes revert to these old habits, allowing my aesthetic aims to trump simple human decency. This is understandable. Like all serious photographers, I wrestle with the inherited baggage passed down to me all the way from the days of Niépce and Talbot. Always, the challenge in street photography is to reverse the old habit: accord the people I meet a measure of dignity and hope, incidentally, that the images I make happen also to have aesthetic consequence. The key to this is personal engagement.
Beaumont’s reliance on Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” bothers me in this regard. You can tell that the piece is becoming ossified when commentators increasingly refer to it as a “classic”. Written hard on the coat-tails of the Paris Surrealists, Woolf (or her narrative stand-in) wanders through the London Streets early one winter evening where she can take cover in darkness and surreptitiously observe those around her. What is conspicuous about the piece—and what bothers me about it—is the lack of engagement between observer and observed. She wonders, for example, what it’s like to be a dwarf as she watches a small person in a boot shop. Woolf speculates. She imagines what must be transpiring between the salesperson and the dwarf. As readers, we learn nothing about the dwarf (how could we?); all we learn about is the prejudice endemic to Woolf’s social station and, 90 years after the fact, the lesson is not flattering. Virginia Woolf could have taken notes from Diane Arbus. If you want to know what it’s like to be a dwarf, spend a few years getting to know the dwarf and gaining her trust. Woolf explicitly eschews this approach; for her “[t]he eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.” She believes—and this is the crux of my contention with her—that she is free to look without expecting anything deeper of her looking.
As a corrective to Virginia Woolf, I commend Olivia Laing’s To The River in which Laing spends a week wandering along the banks of the River Oise, from its source on through Lewes and down to Newhaven where it empties into the English Channel. The River Oise, you may recall, is the river where Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1949. In the spirit of “Street Haunting”, Laing’s book meanders through the countryside. You might almost say that, stylistically and intellectually, Woolf haunts the pages of To The River. Where Laing diverges from Woolf’s course is in her willingness to engage both socially and physically with her milieu. She stays in hotels and bed & breakfasts, visits old friends, and occasionally puts on her bathing suit to jump in the water. Laing models an approach to her surroundings that street photographers would do well to adopt.
