THE WALKING CAMERA

If I look up from my desk and peer across the room, my eyes inevitably fall on a poster of one of my favourite images by one of my favourite photographers.  It’s Garry Winogrand’s image of two women at LAX airport walking toward what’s known as the Theme Building.  It looks like this:

In fact Winogrand took a great many of my favourite photographs.  He was, you’d say, a street photographer (one of those terms that seems to mean less and less the more you say it), and in the course of his work he did a lot of walking and photographed a lot of other walkers.  He’s usually associated with New York, but he took a lot of pictures in LA too.

He even took some in London.  The received wisdom is that his London photographs weren’t as good as his American ones, that his great skill was seeing a familiar environment with fresh eyes: when confronted by an unfamiliar environment this freshness disappeared and he was reduced to taking pictures of guardsmen or men in bowler hats.  Still, I’m very taken by the odd familiarity and strangeness of this one, titled Woman Entering a Cab, London:

 Winogrand did like shooting women in the street, so to speak, which in these days of the demonized male gaze seems a dodgy activity at best, but hell he had nothing on Miroslav Tichý.  I love Geoff Dyer’s description of Tichý’s working method,  “he spent his time perving around Kyjov, photographing women.” Well yes indeed.  I suppose Winogrand’s method was less pervy because it was less sneaky, though I know there are those who’d find this an overfine distinction.

Street photography has been much on my mind lately, having been hunkered down with Reuel Golden’s London: Portrait of a City, a grand photobook, showing London, its people and inevitably its walkers, from Oswald Mosley to the Kray Twins.  Full disclosure: I am mentioned approvingly therein. One picture that particularly stays with me, is the one below by Cecil Beaton, not really pervy I suppose, since it’s obviously a set up with a model, and because the photographer’s perviness was directed elsewhere.

I like taking pictures, I do it all the time, and I’m a good enough photographer to know I’m not a very good photographer. But once in a while I take a photograph that makes me happy.  Here is the best walking I've taken in a very long time, but Garry Winogrand,  I know it ain’t.

PROOF

... if proof were needed, that Dwight Garner "a book critic" (his employer's nomenclature) for the New York Times, leads a charmed life.

I suspect that for readers of this blog, the connections between walking, writing and reading don't need much explication, and here is Dwight, earlier this year, writing in the Times, and making a persuasive case for audio books.

He writes, “Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way. The shirt pocket method is better than using ear buds, which block out the natural world. My wife tucks her phone into her bra, on long walks, and listens to Dickens novels. I find this unbearably sexy.”

Above is a picture of the wife in question, Cree LeFavour.  No sign of audiobook, nor bra for that matter. 

THEORETICAL WALKING

When I was writing The Lost Art of Walking, my fellow psychogeographer (or whatever the hell we are) Iain Sinclair offered the opinion that people hadn’t lost the art, rather that we’ve lost the environment in which people can do any walking.  A nice distinction, though of course once the environment’s gone, people lose the art pretty shortly thereafter.

This issue of the walking environment is discussed in a new book titled Walkable City by Jeff Speck, a “a city planner who advocates for smart growth and sustainable design.” Funny, isn’t it, how you never come across a city planner who advocates stupid growth and unsustainability?  Maybe they don’t write books.  Or maybe they just lie in their author bios.

I’ve only just started reading the book, but I immediately see it contains a “General Theory of Walkability.”  Yes yes, a THEORY of walking, just what the world needs. “To be favored” Speck writes, “a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable and interesting,” which strikes me as simultaneously feeble and condescending.  Of course I’m not going to argue that a walk should be dangerous and dull, and yet “useless” walking with a certain degree of “discomfort” is pretty much what I live for.

I’m also, in general, fairly happy making my own definition of “interesting,” but in case you’re one of the poor souls who doesn’t feel the same way, here’s Mr. Speck to help you.  “Interesting means that sidewalks are lined by unique buildings with friendly faces and that signs of humanity abound.” Kind of makes you want to get in your Hummer and do burnouts, doesn’t it?  Only theoretically, of course.

"Buildings with friendly faces" - oh spare me.

YOUNG AND RESTLESS

We know that Oliver Sacks is not a man who does things by half.  Some people might trip and fall while out walking, and end up with a twisted ankle. When Dr. Sacks falls, the results are dramatically catastrophic.  In his book A Leg to Stand On he meets a bull while walking on a mountain path in Norway.  He turns and runs, falls down the mountain, tears off his quadriceps, crawls for an hour or three, is found by reindeer hunters, stretchered to safety, goes back to England, has a big operation, and tumbles into an existential tail spin.  This of course is good for the writing even as it may be bad for the body and mind.

And things haven’t got any better with age for Sacks.  In his new book Hallucinations he’s walking across his office, trips over a box of books, falls headlong and breaks his hip.  Thus: “I thought I have plenty of time to put out my hand to break the fall, but then – suddenly, I was on the floor, and as I hit, I felt the crunch in my hip.  With near-hallucinatory vividness in the next few weeks, I reexperienced my fall; it replayed itself in my mind and body.” Well, of course it did, Dr. Sacks.

 I’ve also been reading Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace, which is sometimes kind of annoying but sometimes very readable and once in a while very moving.  And walking is occasionally involved.  Neil’s father, who was a journalist and a pretty good dad by all accounts, eventually suffered from Alzheimer’s, becoming in Young’s words “there and not there” and after a while he was “just gone.”

        

Young writes, “Last time we were at the farm we went for one of our many walks.  We always took long walks in the forest together when I visited him, at the farm or anywhere … On that day when we were back on the farm walking, Daddy got lost.  That really was the last walk we went on together.”

I haven't been able to find an image of Oliver Sacks walking, but above is one of him at least standing up. It seems, incidentally, that Oliver Sacks gets lost all the time.  In an interview with the New York Times he said, “A friend gave me a hat with a built-in compass, since I have no sense of direction. It beeps when you face north and the intensity of the beeps shows how close you are. I like to think it’s improving my awareness but truthfully, I don’t think I’m getting any better. And I get a little embarrassed wearing a hat that beeps.”

It was actually easier than I thought to find an image of Neil Young walking.  Here he is by the Berlin wall in the early 80s.  BUt perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.  After all, Neil Young did write a song titled Walk On.  The chorus runs as follows:

     Walk on, walk on,

     Walk on, walk on.