Shop-Front Shrouds

‘The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.’ Walter Benjamin

These images are fashioned from eye and soul of the flâneur and are my homage to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (The Passagenwerk): A brilliant and insightful palimpsest of quotations and reflections on the city life of Paris in the 19th century. The following quote by Howard Eiland’s “Superimposition in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects” precisely eludes to some of my thinking as I reflect on the embodiment of the flâneur in the contemporary urban landscape.

‘At streetcorners, before housefronts and shopfronts, in proximity to particular doorways, particular stretches of cobblestone, particular entrances to the catacombs, particular cafés and cabarets, he experiences an uncanny thickening and layering of phenomena, an effect of superimposition, in which remembered events or habitations show through the present time and place, which have suddenly become transparent, just as in film an image may bleed through one or more simultaneously perceptible, interarticulated images in multiple exposure. It is a dreamlike effect, with the moving imagery characteristically yielding, in the flâneur’s case, a “felt knowledge” that is not yet conceptual.’ Howard Eiland’s Superimposition in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects