Flâneur On Moving Truck
Junyong Cho
In 1838 Louis Daguerre, the French artist and photographer, released in France a photograph he had taken at Paris’s Boulevard du Temple. In this picture, the images of constantly moving passersby were completely absent except for after-images of this boulevard and buildings built around it even in a broad daylight. Nevertheless, what was interesting about this picture was that two people were captured in it, since they kept staying at the same spot with the least degree of their movement, while he was photographing it by using a long-exposure time: these two people turned out to be a shoeblack and his customer. Similarly, I occasionally imagined which forms of image could be captured in my photograph, if I used a long-exposure time in photographing those who are busy walking in streets of the contemporary London, just as Louis Daguerre did in Paris in 1838. The object continuing to stand still in a space, unhindered by modern time...... It was street performers who first entered into my sight. While staring at them performing a living statue in London’s round-the-year hustled and bustled touristic district Covent Garden, bystanders enjoying their performances willingly pay some money to these street performers for being photographed alongside them. While staring at their performances, I try to connect the movement of street performers with the temporality shown from that of flâneur. Flâneur is a French word which means a person who goes for a walk or aimlessly wanders in an (urban) space. Negative though its original meaning seems, the French writer and historian François-Victor Fournel’s sense of art of flâneurie can nevertheless be intrepreted as an act or movement of sensing and comprehending the richness and diversity of urban landscape without being hindered by modern time. I beam the photographic images of street performers onto the rear cargo compartments of the moving commercial lorries, by using a projector. The lorries running on the pavements have their respective destinations to reach and scheduled times to abide by. My camera captures after- images engendered by overlapping the still images of street performers who do not follow such a scheduled or systematized/calculated modern time with these commercial lorries running or moving within the frame of modern time. In this process, these moving commercial lorries temporarily turn into the form of canvas or screen showing the images of street performers, as a result of which they are able to simultaneously inhabit time and space in the end. In other words, I try to show through the work Flâneur on Moving Truck the very brief moment of the spatiotemporal rhythms formed through interactions between these two objects abiding by their own respective temporalities.