THE WALKING GAZE, THE GAZING WALK

This is a depiction of a flaneur:

 

It’s by Honoré Daumier, and is an illustration for M. Louis Huart’s Physiologie Du Flaneur, 1841.

 

The binoculars are a worry aren’t they? I mean they’re not likely to be very useful for looking at anything in the street are they? Things are surely close enough that you don’t need a powerful lens to zoom in on anything.  Compare and contrast with the popularity of the basic 28mm lens as used by a great many street photographers, not least Garry Winogrand.

 

Though other camera options were available, as Diane Arbus demonstrates here.

This is the title page of Physiologie Du Flaneur, 

 

which does suggest that the flaneur is a bit of a lech, watching all the girls go by, maybe even following them.  This is of course all about the male gaze.  According to Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson in her Paris as Revolutionthe flaneur’s gaze ‘begins in the activity of following women.’  This seems impossible to prove or disprove. 

Certainly this fellow, Le Flaneur Parisien by Theophile Steinlen looks dead dodgy, whether he’s about to follow the woman or not.

At least you couldn’t accuse any of the flaneurs illustrated here of being sneaky.  You can see exactly what they’re up to, and I’m reminded of Walter Benjamin’s words: ‘Dialectic of flaneurie: on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man.’ These guys look completely discovered.

 

But you know, it was a different age.

 

OF WALKING AND GAZING

Note the legs.

 I’ve been thinking about Music to Watch Girls By, the 1966 tune composed by Sidney ‘Sid’ Ramin and recorded as an instrumental by The Bob Crewe Generation. The trumpet on it sounds like a faux Herb Alpert.

 

Then in 1967 there was a version with lyrics by Tony Velona, recorded by Andy Williams. Some of the lyrics run

‘The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by
Eye to eye, they solemnly convene to make the scene’ 

 

Words from a different age obviously – how rarely anybody ‘makes the scene’ these days - And we all know that the male gaze is bad and wrong, but here I guess there’s a certain gender equality – the male gaze encounters the returning female gaze.  Cool.

 

Music to Watch Girls By  was, in some sense, a kind of update of the song

Standing on the Corner 

by Frank Loesser from the 1956 musical The Most Happy Fella, originally recorded by a group called the Four Lads.  The girls were no doubt walking, the men just mooching.

 

The lyrics here run

Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Brother you don't know a nicer occupation
Matter of fact, neither do I

 

Sounds innocent enough, it even sounds ‘nice,’ but is it?  Later lyrics in the song run:

Brother, you can't go to jail
For what you're thinking
Or for the woo look in your eye

But it seems possible that you can.  Here’s a sign that was up in the tube station at Walthamstow. I assume it must be in other places too:

 

‘Intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and is not tolerated.’  I’m sure our courts will make some clear and prudent definitions of when a look becomes a stare, and when a stare becomes an ‘intrusive stare.’