I recently interviewed the Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Slack for the British Royal Photographic Society. Inevitably a certain amount of our conversation ended up on the cutting room floor and some of that concerned walking.
Mike is creating a series of books with the overall title Walking in Place, in which he walks around various cities, photographing what he sees. The first book featured New Orleans. This is a spread from the book:
Perhaps inevitably, we mentioned psychogeography in our conversation. Now, I’ve learned from experience that when you mention psychogeography to most civilians their eyes just glaze over, so that was one of the first things to be cut, but since I imagine readers of this blog are made of sterner stuff, here’s how the exchange went:
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GN: I see that notions of walking, maybe psychogeography, pop up in your work. Can you say anything about that?
MS: The aimless wandering aspect has always been a really fruitful method for seeing new things and making new pictures. An increasingly important part of it for me is the randomness, just rolling the proverbial dice and ending up somewhere and zeroing in a specific scene, a picture, at whatever scale, which always seems to link somehow to another specific picture from another time and place, and so on, all of the pictures somehow connected. I don’t know if that’s strictly a psychogeographic approach, but the “game” aspect of it is really appealing, using playful methods to tune into your immediate surrounding, and letting chance dictate the content or pathway.
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Here's Mr Slack with an image that appears in the New Orleans book: 
And here's the link to the RPS interview:
